From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. Attended by thousands, these were seminal events in the world of French letters. Picador is proud to be publishing the lectures in thirteen volumes.
The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense in "Society Must Be Defended," Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were preorogatives of power in the nineteenth century.
The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's work and offer a unique window into his thinking.

From 1971 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault taught at the Collège de France, one of the most unique and renowned institutions of learning in the world. It enrolls no students and confers no degrees. Professors are required to deliver lectures to the general public on topics from their ongoing research. Foucault's lectures at the Collège were extraordinary events. To the audiences that attended them—frequently numbering in the thousands—they were seminal events, profoundly influencing an entire generation of scholars, students, and writers.

These lectures, painstakingly reconstructed from tape recordings and from Foucault's own notes, are now being made available in English for the first time. Under the guidance of series editor Arnold I. Davidson, Holtzbrinck will publish all thirteen volumes of the lectures in North America.

Abnormal is the second volume of this series. Based on lectures given in 1974-1975—the period when Foucault was working on Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison and the first volume of the History of Sexuality—they reveal Foucault's on-going investigation into the "network of power and knowledge" constituted by discipline, normalization, and biopolitics. He argues that the three figures of the human monster, the individual to be corrected, and the onanist were brought together under the domain of the abnormal at the beginning of the nineteenth century, linking deformity, delinquency, and sexual deviancy. Rather than being purely coercive and violent, however, power, Foucault argues, must also be conceived of as productive: a power that is linked to positive techniques of intervention, transformation, and fabrication. He also traces a shift here from judicial inquiry of actions and relationships to an "examination" of the body and its desires. "The body and its pleasures, rather than the required form for legitimate union become, as it were, the code of the carnal."

As Davidson emphasizes in his introduction to this volume, Abnormal "adds yet another layer to the virtually inexhaustible fields of study that Foucault's work has bequeathed to us." Indeed, every course at the Collège de France contributes immeasurably to our understanding and appreciation of the most important works of one of our greatest contemporary thinkers. These lectures also stand on their own as incomparable performances of intellectual daring, imagination, and insight.

"The importance of these lectures is that they are directly connected with two of Foucault's greatest books, Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Because they are clear and to the point, the lectures throw considerable light on the more difficult ideas and passages of their related published works . . . [Abnormal] looks at a set of what Foucault believed to be defining criminal cases of how the West has constituted and reconstituted what is normal and not normal behavior."—Charles Mudede, The Stranger