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.
Michel Foucault, acknowledged as the preeminent philosopher of France in the 1970s and 1980s, continues to have enormous impact throughout the world in many disciplines.  His works include  Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, The History of Sexuality, and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.


Series editor Arnold I. Davidson teaches philosophy, divinity, and comparative literature at the University of Chicago and is executive editor of the journal Critical Inquiry. He has published numerous studies on Michel Foucault, and is the author of the Emergence of Sexuality: Historical Epistemology and the Formation of Concepts and coauthor of La Philosophie comme manière de vivre.


Translator Graham Burchell lives in Italy. He has written essays on Michel Foucault and was an editor of The Foucault Effect: Essays on Governmentality.
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
"Foucault is quite central to our sense of where we are . . . [He] is carrying out, in the noblest way, the promiscuous aim of true culture."—The Nation


"Comprises previously unavailable work produced by one of the most incisive cultural theorists of the century."—Alan Reed, See Magazine (Named a Top Ten Book of 2003) "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


"These lectures offer important insights into the evolution of the primary focus of Foucault's later work—the relationship between power and knowledge."—Library Journal  "[This] second collection of lectures by the influential philosopher addresses the role of psychiatry in the modern criminal justice system, the theme of societal defense against criminals, how to define 'abnormality' and 'normality', and how to identify and categorize criminal behavior and perpetrators."—Forecast "Brilliant and vivid . . . What distinguishes these lectures is their narrow focus and an abundance of meticulously compiled historical detail, which offer the reader a rare insight into Foucault's thought processes and working methods . . . Foucault's site of research and the place of his thinking become discernible to the reader with astonishing immediacy . . . Reading these lectures, it is at times astonishing to what extent Foucault's voice regains presence, relocating the reader into the crowded lecture auditorium at the Collège de France where those words were spoken."—Bobby J. George and Felix Grisebach for Curled Up with a Good Book


"This is the second volume in the complete Collège de France lectures of Michel Foucault. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the Collège de France. Attended by thousands, they created benchmarks for contemporary critical inquiry. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal
af0 justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who 'resemble their crime before they commit it.' Building on the themes of societal self-defense in the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining 'abnormality' and 'normality' were prerogatives of