PSYCHIATRIC POWER
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003.
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003.
Foucault-Psychiatric-Power-1973-74
?
MICHEL FOUCAULT
Psychiatric Power
LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1973-74
Edited by Jacques Lagrange
General Editors: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM BURCHELL
liberte >>Egalite - Fraternity REPUBLIQUE FRANCAISE
This hook is supported hy the French Ministry ol Foreign Allairs, as part ol the Burgess programme run hy the Cultural Department ol ,hc Frcnch Embassy in London.
(www. lrenchhooknews. com)
? PSYCHIATRIC POWER
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. Edition established under the direction of Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, by Jacques Lagrange. Translation (C) Graham Burchell, 2006. Introduction (C) Arnold I. Davidson, 2006.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2006 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave MacmiUan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave MacmiUan Ltd. MacmiUan(R) is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN-13:978-1-4039-6922-1 hardback ISBN-10:1-4039-6922-1 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 987654321 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
? CONTENTS
Foreword: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson Translator's Note
one
7 NOVEMBER 1973
The space of the asylum and disciplinary order. ^
process and "moral treatment. " ^ Scenes of curing. ^ Changes made by the coursefrom the approach o^Histoire de la folie;
1. From an analysis of "representations" to an "analytics of power"; 2. From "violence" to the "microphysics of power";
3. From "institutional regularities" to the "arrangements" of power.
14 NOVEMBER 1973
Scene of a cure: George HI. From the "macrophysics of sovereignty " to the "microphysics of disciplinary power. " ^ The newfigure of the madman. ^ Little encyclopedia of scenes of cures. ^ The practice of hypnosis and hysteria. ^ The psychoanalytic scene; the antipsychiatric scene. ^
Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall. ^ Manipulation
of madness and stratagem of truth: Mason Cox.
two
Therapeutic
? VI
CONTENTS
three
21 NOVEMBER 1973 39
four
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. yy The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. ^ Forms of disciplinary power: army,
police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. ^ Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
28 NOVEMBER 1973
Elementsfor a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonisation of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops;
workers' cities. ^ Theformali^ation of these apparatuses in Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon. ^ The family
institution and emergence of the Psy function.
5 DECEMBER 1973
The asylum and thefamily. From interdiction to confinement. The break between the asylum and thefamily. ^ The asylum; a curing machine. nu Typology of "corporal apparatuses
(appareils corporels) ". ^ The madman and the child. r^f Clinics (maisons de sante). ^ Disciplinary apparatuses andfamily power.
12 DECEMBER 1973
Constitution of the child as target of psychiatric
intervention. ^ A family-asylum utopia: the Clermont-en-Oise asylum. ~ From psychiatry as "ambiguous master" of reality and truth in proto-psychiatric practices to psychiatry as "agent of intensification " of reality. ^ Psychiatric power and discourse of truth. ^ The problem of simulation and the insurrection of the hysterics. ^ The question of the birth of psychoanalysis.
63
five
93
six
123
seven
19 DECEMBER 1973 17l3
Psychiatric power. ^ A treatment by Francois Leuret and its strategic elements: 1-creating an imbalance of power; 2-the ruse
? eight
of language; 3-the management of needs; 4-the statement of truth. ^ The pleasure of the illness. ^ The asylum apparatus ('dispositif).
9 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the practice of "direction". ^ The game of "reality " in the asylum. ^ The asylum, a medically demarcated space and the question of its medical or administrative direction. ^ The tokens of psychiatric knowledge: (a) the technique of questioning; (b) the interplay of medication and punishment; (c) the clinical
presentation. ^ Asylum "microphysics of power. " ^ Emergence of the Psyfunction and of neuropathology. ^ The triple destiny of psychiatric power.
16JANUARY 1974
The modes of generalization of psychiatric power and the psychiatrixation of childhood. ^ 1. The theoretical specification
of idiocy. The criterion of development. ^ Emergence of a psychopathology of idiocy and mental retardation. Edouard
Seguin: instinct and abnormality. ^ 2. The institutional annexation of idiocy by psychiatric power. ^ The "moral treatment" of idiots: Seguin. ^ The process of confinement and the stigmati\ation of the dangerousness of idiots. ^ Recourse to the notion of degeneration.
23 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the question of truth: questioning and confession; magnetism and hypnosis; drugs. ^ Elementsfor a history of truth: 1. The truth-event and itsforms: judicial, alchemical and medical practices. ^ Transition to a technology of demonstrative truth. Its elements: (a) procedures of inquiry; (b) institution of a subject of knowledge; (c) ruling out the crisis in medicine and psychiatry and its supports: the disciplinary space of the asylum, recourse to pathological anatomy; relationships between madness and
crime. ^ Psychiatric power and hysterical resistance.
173
nine
201
ten
233
Contents vii
? vni CONTENTS
eleven 30 JANUARY 1977I
The problem of diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The
place of the body in psychiatric nosology: the model of general paralysis. ^ Thefate of the notion of crisis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The test of reality in psychiatry and its forms:
1. Psychiatricquestioning(l'interrogatoire) andconfession. The ritual of clinical presentation. Note on "pathological heredity" and degeneration. ^ 2. Drugs. Moreau de Tours and hashish. Madness and dreams. ^ 3. Magnetism and hypnosis. The discovery of the "neurological body. "
265
twelve 6 FEBRUARY 1974 297 The emergence of the neurological body: Broca and Duchenne
de Boulogne. ^ Illnesses of differential diagnosis and illnesses of absolute diagnosis. ^ The model of "generalparalysis" and the neuroses. ^ The battle of hysteria: 1. The organisation of a
"symptomatological scenario. " ^ 2. The maneuver of the "functional mannequin " and hypnosis. The question of
simulation. ^ sexual body.
Course Summary Course Context Index of Names Index of Notions Index of Places
3. Neurosis and trauma. The irruption of the
335
3zl9 369 376 383
? FOREWORD
MICHEL FOUCAULT TAUGHT AT the College de France From January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (with the exception of 1977 when he took a sabbatical year). The title of his chair was "The History ol Systems of Thought. "
On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the College de France and replaced that of "The History of Philosophical Thought" held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970. ' He was 43 years old.
Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture was delivered on 2 December 1970. 2 Teaching at the College de France is governed by particular rules. Professors must provide 26 hours of teaching a year (with the possibil ity of a maximum of half this total being given in the form of seminars^). Each year they must present their original research and this obliges them to change the content of their teaching for each course. Courses and seminars are completely open; no enrolment or qualification is required and the professors do not award any qualifications/1 In the ter minology of the College de France, the prolessors do not have students but only auditors.
Michel Foucault's courses were held every Wednesday from January to March. The huge audience made up ol students, teachers, researchers and the curious, including many who came Irom outside France, required two amphitheaters of the College de France. Foucault olten complained about the distance between himsell and his "public" and ol how lew exchanges the course made possible. 5 He would have liked a seminar in which real collective work could take place and made a number of attempts to bring
? X
FOREWORD
this about. In the final years he devoted a long period to answering his auditors' questions at the end of each course.
This is how Gerard Petitjean, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur, described the atmosphere at Foucault's lectures in 1975:
When Foucault enters the amphitheater, brisk and dynamic like someone who plunges into the water, he steps over bodies to reach his chair, pushes away the cassette recorders so he can put down his papers, removes his jacket, lights a lamp and sets off at full speed. His voice is strong and effective, amplified by loudspeakers that are the only concession to modernism in a hall that is barely lit by light spread from stucco bowls. The hall has three hundred places and there are five hundred people packed together, filling the smallest free space . . . There is no oratorical effect. It is clear and terribly effective. There is absolutely no concession to impro- visation. Foucault has twelve hours each year to explain in a pub- lic course the direction taken by his research in the year just ended. So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures.
PSYCHIATRIC POWER
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. Edition established under the direction of Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, by Jacques Lagrange. Translation (C) Graham Burchell, 2006. Introduction (C) Arnold I. Davidson, 2006.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2006 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave MacmiUan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave MacmiUan Ltd. MacmiUan(R) is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN-13:978-1-4039-6922-1 hardback ISBN-10:1-4039-6922-1 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 987654321 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
? CONTENTS
Foreword: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson Translator's Note
one
7 NOVEMBER 1973
The space of the asylum and disciplinary order. ^
process and "moral treatment. " ^ Scenes of curing. ^ Changes made by the coursefrom the approach o^Histoire de la folie;
1. From an analysis of "representations" to an "analytics of power"; 2. From "violence" to the "microphysics of power";
3. From "institutional regularities" to the "arrangements" of power.
14 NOVEMBER 1973
Scene of a cure: George HI. From the "macrophysics of sovereignty " to the "microphysics of disciplinary power. " ^ The newfigure of the madman. ^ Little encyclopedia of scenes of cures. ^ The practice of hypnosis and hysteria. ^ The psychoanalytic scene; the antipsychiatric scene. ^
Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall. ^ Manipulation
of madness and stratagem of truth: Mason Cox.
two
Therapeutic
? VI
CONTENTS
three
21 NOVEMBER 1973 39
four
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. yy The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. ^ Forms of disciplinary power: army,
police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. ^ Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
28 NOVEMBER 1973
Elementsfor a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonisation of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops;
workers' cities. ^ Theformali^ation of these apparatuses in Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon. ^ The family
institution and emergence of the Psy function.
5 DECEMBER 1973
The asylum and thefamily. From interdiction to confinement. The break between the asylum and thefamily. ^ The asylum; a curing machine. nu Typology of "corporal apparatuses
(appareils corporels) ". ^ The madman and the child. r^f Clinics (maisons de sante). ^ Disciplinary apparatuses andfamily power.
12 DECEMBER 1973
Constitution of the child as target of psychiatric
intervention. ^ A family-asylum utopia: the Clermont-en-Oise asylum. ~ From psychiatry as "ambiguous master" of reality and truth in proto-psychiatric practices to psychiatry as "agent of intensification " of reality. ^ Psychiatric power and discourse of truth. ^ The problem of simulation and the insurrection of the hysterics. ^ The question of the birth of psychoanalysis.
63
five
93
six
123
seven
19 DECEMBER 1973 17l3
Psychiatric power. ^ A treatment by Francois Leuret and its strategic elements: 1-creating an imbalance of power; 2-the ruse
? eight
of language; 3-the management of needs; 4-the statement of truth. ^ The pleasure of the illness. ^ The asylum apparatus ('dispositif).
9 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the practice of "direction". ^ The game of "reality " in the asylum. ^ The asylum, a medically demarcated space and the question of its medical or administrative direction. ^ The tokens of psychiatric knowledge: (a) the technique of questioning; (b) the interplay of medication and punishment; (c) the clinical
presentation. ^ Asylum "microphysics of power. " ^ Emergence of the Psyfunction and of neuropathology. ^ The triple destiny of psychiatric power.
16JANUARY 1974
The modes of generalization of psychiatric power and the psychiatrixation of childhood. ^ 1. The theoretical specification
of idiocy. The criterion of development. ^ Emergence of a psychopathology of idiocy and mental retardation. Edouard
Seguin: instinct and abnormality. ^ 2. The institutional annexation of idiocy by psychiatric power. ^ The "moral treatment" of idiots: Seguin. ^ The process of confinement and the stigmati\ation of the dangerousness of idiots. ^ Recourse to the notion of degeneration.
23 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the question of truth: questioning and confession; magnetism and hypnosis; drugs. ^ Elementsfor a history of truth: 1. The truth-event and itsforms: judicial, alchemical and medical practices. ^ Transition to a technology of demonstrative truth. Its elements: (a) procedures of inquiry; (b) institution of a subject of knowledge; (c) ruling out the crisis in medicine and psychiatry and its supports: the disciplinary space of the asylum, recourse to pathological anatomy; relationships between madness and
crime. ^ Psychiatric power and hysterical resistance.
173
nine
201
ten
233
Contents vii
? vni CONTENTS
eleven 30 JANUARY 1977I
The problem of diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The
place of the body in psychiatric nosology: the model of general paralysis. ^ Thefate of the notion of crisis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The test of reality in psychiatry and its forms:
1. Psychiatricquestioning(l'interrogatoire) andconfession. The ritual of clinical presentation. Note on "pathological heredity" and degeneration. ^ 2. Drugs. Moreau de Tours and hashish. Madness and dreams. ^ 3. Magnetism and hypnosis. The discovery of the "neurological body. "
265
twelve 6 FEBRUARY 1974 297 The emergence of the neurological body: Broca and Duchenne
de Boulogne. ^ Illnesses of differential diagnosis and illnesses of absolute diagnosis. ^ The model of "generalparalysis" and the neuroses. ^ The battle of hysteria: 1. The organisation of a
"symptomatological scenario. " ^ 2. The maneuver of the "functional mannequin " and hypnosis. The question of
simulation. ^ sexual body.
Course Summary Course Context Index of Names Index of Notions Index of Places
3. Neurosis and trauma. The irruption of the
335
3zl9 369 376 383
? FOREWORD
MICHEL FOUCAULT TAUGHT AT the College de France From January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (with the exception of 1977 when he took a sabbatical year). The title of his chair was "The History ol Systems of Thought. "
On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the College de France and replaced that of "The History of Philosophical Thought" held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970. ' He was 43 years old.
Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture was delivered on 2 December 1970. 2 Teaching at the College de France is governed by particular rules. Professors must provide 26 hours of teaching a year (with the possibil ity of a maximum of half this total being given in the form of seminars^). Each year they must present their original research and this obliges them to change the content of their teaching for each course. Courses and seminars are completely open; no enrolment or qualification is required and the professors do not award any qualifications/1 In the ter minology of the College de France, the prolessors do not have students but only auditors.
Michel Foucault's courses were held every Wednesday from January to March. The huge audience made up ol students, teachers, researchers and the curious, including many who came Irom outside France, required two amphitheaters of the College de France. Foucault olten complained about the distance between himsell and his "public" and ol how lew exchanges the course made possible. 5 He would have liked a seminar in which real collective work could take place and made a number of attempts to bring
? X
FOREWORD
this about. In the final years he devoted a long period to answering his auditors' questions at the end of each course.
This is how Gerard Petitjean, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur, described the atmosphere at Foucault's lectures in 1975:
When Foucault enters the amphitheater, brisk and dynamic like someone who plunges into the water, he steps over bodies to reach his chair, pushes away the cassette recorders so he can put down his papers, removes his jacket, lights a lamp and sets off at full speed. His voice is strong and effective, amplified by loudspeakers that are the only concession to modernism in a hall that is barely lit by light spread from stucco bowls. The hall has three hundred places and there are five hundred people packed together, filling the smallest free space . . . There is no oratorical effect. It is clear and terribly effective. There is absolutely no concession to impro- visation. Foucault has twelve hours each year to explain in a pub- lic course the direction taken by his research in the year just ended. So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures. Daniel Defert possesses Michel Foucault's notes and he is to be warmly thanked for allowing the editors to consult them.
This edition of the College de France courses was authorized by Michel Foucault's heirs who wanted to be able to satisfy the strong demand for their publication, in France as elsewhere, and to do this under indisputably responsible conditions. The editors have tried to be equal to the degree ol conlidence placed in them.
FRANCOIS EWALD AND ALESSANDRO FONTANA
? 1. Michel Foucault concluded a short document drawn up in support of his candidacy with these words: "We should undertake the history ol systems of thought. " "Titres et travaux," in Dils et Ecrits, 195/l-19S8, four volumes, ed.
Psychiatric Power
LECTURES AT THE COLLEGE DE FRANCE, 1973-74
Edited by Jacques Lagrange
General Editors: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
English Series Editor: Arnold I. Davidson TRANSLATED BY GRAHAM BURCHELL
liberte >>Egalite - Fraternity REPUBLIQUE FRANCAISE
This hook is supported hy the French Ministry ol Foreign Allairs, as part ol the Burgess programme run hy the Cultural Department ol ,hc Frcnch Embassy in London.
(www. lrenchhooknews. com)
? PSYCHIATRIC POWER
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. Edition established under the direction of Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, by Jacques Lagrange. Translation (C) Graham Burchell, 2006. Introduction (C) Arnold I. Davidson, 2006.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2006 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave MacmiUan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave MacmiUan Ltd. MacmiUan(R) is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN-13:978-1-4039-6922-1 hardback ISBN-10:1-4039-6922-1 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 987654321 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
? CONTENTS
Foreword: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson Translator's Note
one
7 NOVEMBER 1973
The space of the asylum and disciplinary order. ^
process and "moral treatment. " ^ Scenes of curing. ^ Changes made by the coursefrom the approach o^Histoire de la folie;
1. From an analysis of "representations" to an "analytics of power"; 2. From "violence" to the "microphysics of power";
3. From "institutional regularities" to the "arrangements" of power.
14 NOVEMBER 1973
Scene of a cure: George HI. From the "macrophysics of sovereignty " to the "microphysics of disciplinary power. " ^ The newfigure of the madman. ^ Little encyclopedia of scenes of cures. ^ The practice of hypnosis and hysteria. ^ The psychoanalytic scene; the antipsychiatric scene. ^
Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall. ^ Manipulation
of madness and stratagem of truth: Mason Cox.
two
Therapeutic
? VI
CONTENTS
three
21 NOVEMBER 1973 39
four
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. yy The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. ^ Forms of disciplinary power: army,
police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. ^ Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
28 NOVEMBER 1973
Elementsfor a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonisation of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops;
workers' cities. ^ Theformali^ation of these apparatuses in Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon. ^ The family
institution and emergence of the Psy function.
5 DECEMBER 1973
The asylum and thefamily. From interdiction to confinement. The break between the asylum and thefamily. ^ The asylum; a curing machine. nu Typology of "corporal apparatuses
(appareils corporels) ". ^ The madman and the child. r^f Clinics (maisons de sante). ^ Disciplinary apparatuses andfamily power.
12 DECEMBER 1973
Constitution of the child as target of psychiatric
intervention. ^ A family-asylum utopia: the Clermont-en-Oise asylum. ~ From psychiatry as "ambiguous master" of reality and truth in proto-psychiatric practices to psychiatry as "agent of intensification " of reality. ^ Psychiatric power and discourse of truth. ^ The problem of simulation and the insurrection of the hysterics. ^ The question of the birth of psychoanalysis.
63
five
93
six
123
seven
19 DECEMBER 1973 17l3
Psychiatric power. ^ A treatment by Francois Leuret and its strategic elements: 1-creating an imbalance of power; 2-the ruse
? eight
of language; 3-the management of needs; 4-the statement of truth. ^ The pleasure of the illness. ^ The asylum apparatus ('dispositif).
9 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the practice of "direction". ^ The game of "reality " in the asylum. ^ The asylum, a medically demarcated space and the question of its medical or administrative direction. ^ The tokens of psychiatric knowledge: (a) the technique of questioning; (b) the interplay of medication and punishment; (c) the clinical
presentation. ^ Asylum "microphysics of power. " ^ Emergence of the Psyfunction and of neuropathology. ^ The triple destiny of psychiatric power.
16JANUARY 1974
The modes of generalization of psychiatric power and the psychiatrixation of childhood. ^ 1. The theoretical specification
of idiocy. The criterion of development. ^ Emergence of a psychopathology of idiocy and mental retardation. Edouard
Seguin: instinct and abnormality. ^ 2. The institutional annexation of idiocy by psychiatric power. ^ The "moral treatment" of idiots: Seguin. ^ The process of confinement and the stigmati\ation of the dangerousness of idiots. ^ Recourse to the notion of degeneration.
23 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the question of truth: questioning and confession; magnetism and hypnosis; drugs. ^ Elementsfor a history of truth: 1. The truth-event and itsforms: judicial, alchemical and medical practices. ^ Transition to a technology of demonstrative truth. Its elements: (a) procedures of inquiry; (b) institution of a subject of knowledge; (c) ruling out the crisis in medicine and psychiatry and its supports: the disciplinary space of the asylum, recourse to pathological anatomy; relationships between madness and
crime. ^ Psychiatric power and hysterical resistance.
173
nine
201
ten
233
Contents vii
? vni CONTENTS
eleven 30 JANUARY 1977I
The problem of diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The
place of the body in psychiatric nosology: the model of general paralysis. ^ Thefate of the notion of crisis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The test of reality in psychiatry and its forms:
1. Psychiatricquestioning(l'interrogatoire) andconfession. The ritual of clinical presentation. Note on "pathological heredity" and degeneration. ^ 2. Drugs. Moreau de Tours and hashish. Madness and dreams. ^ 3. Magnetism and hypnosis. The discovery of the "neurological body. "
265
twelve 6 FEBRUARY 1974 297 The emergence of the neurological body: Broca and Duchenne
de Boulogne. ^ Illnesses of differential diagnosis and illnesses of absolute diagnosis. ^ The model of "generalparalysis" and the neuroses. ^ The battle of hysteria: 1. The organisation of a
"symptomatological scenario. " ^ 2. The maneuver of the "functional mannequin " and hypnosis. The question of
simulation. ^ sexual body.
Course Summary Course Context Index of Names Index of Notions Index of Places
3. Neurosis and trauma. The irruption of the
335
3zl9 369 376 383
? FOREWORD
MICHEL FOUCAULT TAUGHT AT the College de France From January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (with the exception of 1977 when he took a sabbatical year). The title of his chair was "The History ol Systems of Thought. "
On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the College de France and replaced that of "The History of Philosophical Thought" held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970. ' He was 43 years old.
Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture was delivered on 2 December 1970. 2 Teaching at the College de France is governed by particular rules. Professors must provide 26 hours of teaching a year (with the possibil ity of a maximum of half this total being given in the form of seminars^). Each year they must present their original research and this obliges them to change the content of their teaching for each course. Courses and seminars are completely open; no enrolment or qualification is required and the professors do not award any qualifications/1 In the ter minology of the College de France, the prolessors do not have students but only auditors.
Michel Foucault's courses were held every Wednesday from January to March. The huge audience made up ol students, teachers, researchers and the curious, including many who came Irom outside France, required two amphitheaters of the College de France. Foucault olten complained about the distance between himsell and his "public" and ol how lew exchanges the course made possible. 5 He would have liked a seminar in which real collective work could take place and made a number of attempts to bring
? X
FOREWORD
this about. In the final years he devoted a long period to answering his auditors' questions at the end of each course.
This is how Gerard Petitjean, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur, described the atmosphere at Foucault's lectures in 1975:
When Foucault enters the amphitheater, brisk and dynamic like someone who plunges into the water, he steps over bodies to reach his chair, pushes away the cassette recorders so he can put down his papers, removes his jacket, lights a lamp and sets off at full speed. His voice is strong and effective, amplified by loudspeakers that are the only concession to modernism in a hall that is barely lit by light spread from stucco bowls. The hall has three hundred places and there are five hundred people packed together, filling the smallest free space . . . There is no oratorical effect. It is clear and terribly effective. There is absolutely no concession to impro- visation. Foucault has twelve hours each year to explain in a pub- lic course the direction taken by his research in the year just ended. So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures.
PSYCHIATRIC POWER
(C) Editions du Seuil/Gallimard, 2003. Edition established under the direction of Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana, by Jacques Lagrange. Translation (C) Graham Burchell, 2006. Introduction (C) Arnold I. Davidson, 2006.
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency,
90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP.
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2006 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLANTM
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010
Companies and representatives throughout the world
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave MacmiUan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave MacmiUan Ltd. MacmiUan(R) is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries.
ISBN-13:978-1-4039-6922-1 hardback ISBN-10:1-4039-6922-1 hardback
This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
10 987654321 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne
? CONTENTS
Foreword: Francois Ewald and Alessandro Fontana
Introduction: Arnold I. Davidson Translator's Note
one
7 NOVEMBER 1973
The space of the asylum and disciplinary order. ^
process and "moral treatment. " ^ Scenes of curing. ^ Changes made by the coursefrom the approach o^Histoire de la folie;
1. From an analysis of "representations" to an "analytics of power"; 2. From "violence" to the "microphysics of power";
3. From "institutional regularities" to the "arrangements" of power.
14 NOVEMBER 1973
Scene of a cure: George HI. From the "macrophysics of sovereignty " to the "microphysics of disciplinary power. " ^ The newfigure of the madman. ^ Little encyclopedia of scenes of cures. ^ The practice of hypnosis and hysteria. ^ The psychoanalytic scene; the antipsychiatric scene. ^
Mary Barnes at Kingsley Hall. ^ Manipulation
of madness and stratagem of truth: Mason Cox.
two
Therapeutic
? VI
CONTENTS
three
21 NOVEMBER 1973 39
four
Genealogy of "disciplinary power. " The "power of sovereignty. yy The subjectfunction in disciplinary power and in the power of sovereignty. ^ Forms of disciplinary power: army,
police, apprenticeship, workshop, school. ^ Disciplinary power as "normalizing agency. " ^ Technology of disciplinary power and constitution of the "individual. " ^ Emergence of the human sciences.
28 NOVEMBER 1973
Elementsfor a history of disciplinary apparatuses: religious communities in the Middle Ages; pedagogical colonisation of youth; the Jesuit missions to Paraguay; the army; workshops;
workers' cities. ^ Theformali^ation of these apparatuses in Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon. ^ The family
institution and emergence of the Psy function.
5 DECEMBER 1973
The asylum and thefamily. From interdiction to confinement. The break between the asylum and thefamily. ^ The asylum; a curing machine. nu Typology of "corporal apparatuses
(appareils corporels) ". ^ The madman and the child. r^f Clinics (maisons de sante). ^ Disciplinary apparatuses andfamily power.
12 DECEMBER 1973
Constitution of the child as target of psychiatric
intervention. ^ A family-asylum utopia: the Clermont-en-Oise asylum. ~ From psychiatry as "ambiguous master" of reality and truth in proto-psychiatric practices to psychiatry as "agent of intensification " of reality. ^ Psychiatric power and discourse of truth. ^ The problem of simulation and the insurrection of the hysterics. ^ The question of the birth of psychoanalysis.
63
five
93
six
123
seven
19 DECEMBER 1973 17l3
Psychiatric power. ^ A treatment by Francois Leuret and its strategic elements: 1-creating an imbalance of power; 2-the ruse
? eight
of language; 3-the management of needs; 4-the statement of truth. ^ The pleasure of the illness. ^ The asylum apparatus ('dispositif).
9 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the practice of "direction". ^ The game of "reality " in the asylum. ^ The asylum, a medically demarcated space and the question of its medical or administrative direction. ^ The tokens of psychiatric knowledge: (a) the technique of questioning; (b) the interplay of medication and punishment; (c) the clinical
presentation. ^ Asylum "microphysics of power. " ^ Emergence of the Psyfunction and of neuropathology. ^ The triple destiny of psychiatric power.
16JANUARY 1974
The modes of generalization of psychiatric power and the psychiatrixation of childhood. ^ 1. The theoretical specification
of idiocy. The criterion of development. ^ Emergence of a psychopathology of idiocy and mental retardation. Edouard
Seguin: instinct and abnormality. ^ 2. The institutional annexation of idiocy by psychiatric power. ^ The "moral treatment" of idiots: Seguin. ^ The process of confinement and the stigmati\ation of the dangerousness of idiots. ^ Recourse to the notion of degeneration.
23 JANUARY 1974
Psychiatric power and the question of truth: questioning and confession; magnetism and hypnosis; drugs. ^ Elementsfor a history of truth: 1. The truth-event and itsforms: judicial, alchemical and medical practices. ^ Transition to a technology of demonstrative truth. Its elements: (a) procedures of inquiry; (b) institution of a subject of knowledge; (c) ruling out the crisis in medicine and psychiatry and its supports: the disciplinary space of the asylum, recourse to pathological anatomy; relationships between madness and
crime. ^ Psychiatric power and hysterical resistance.
173
nine
201
ten
233
Contents vii
? vni CONTENTS
eleven 30 JANUARY 1977I
The problem of diagnosis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The
place of the body in psychiatric nosology: the model of general paralysis. ^ Thefate of the notion of crisis in medicine and psychiatry. ^ The test of reality in psychiatry and its forms:
1. Psychiatricquestioning(l'interrogatoire) andconfession. The ritual of clinical presentation. Note on "pathological heredity" and degeneration. ^ 2. Drugs. Moreau de Tours and hashish. Madness and dreams. ^ 3. Magnetism and hypnosis. The discovery of the "neurological body. "
265
twelve 6 FEBRUARY 1974 297 The emergence of the neurological body: Broca and Duchenne
de Boulogne. ^ Illnesses of differential diagnosis and illnesses of absolute diagnosis. ^ The model of "generalparalysis" and the neuroses. ^ The battle of hysteria: 1. The organisation of a
"symptomatological scenario. " ^ 2. The maneuver of the "functional mannequin " and hypnosis. The question of
simulation. ^ sexual body.
Course Summary Course Context Index of Names Index of Notions Index of Places
3. Neurosis and trauma. The irruption of the
335
3zl9 369 376 383
? FOREWORD
MICHEL FOUCAULT TAUGHT AT the College de France From January 1971 until his death in June 1984 (with the exception of 1977 when he took a sabbatical year). The title of his chair was "The History ol Systems of Thought. "
On the proposal of Jules Vuillemin, the chair was created on 30 November 1969 by the general assembly of the professors of the College de France and replaced that of "The History of Philosophical Thought" held by Jean Hyppolite until his death. The same assembly elected Michel Foucault to the new chair on 12 April 1970. ' He was 43 years old.
Michel Foucault's inaugural lecture was delivered on 2 December 1970. 2 Teaching at the College de France is governed by particular rules. Professors must provide 26 hours of teaching a year (with the possibil ity of a maximum of half this total being given in the form of seminars^). Each year they must present their original research and this obliges them to change the content of their teaching for each course. Courses and seminars are completely open; no enrolment or qualification is required and the professors do not award any qualifications/1 In the ter minology of the College de France, the prolessors do not have students but only auditors.
Michel Foucault's courses were held every Wednesday from January to March. The huge audience made up ol students, teachers, researchers and the curious, including many who came Irom outside France, required two amphitheaters of the College de France. Foucault olten complained about the distance between himsell and his "public" and ol how lew exchanges the course made possible. 5 He would have liked a seminar in which real collective work could take place and made a number of attempts to bring
? X
FOREWORD
this about. In the final years he devoted a long period to answering his auditors' questions at the end of each course.
This is how Gerard Petitjean, a journalist from Le Nouvel Observateur, described the atmosphere at Foucault's lectures in 1975:
When Foucault enters the amphitheater, brisk and dynamic like someone who plunges into the water, he steps over bodies to reach his chair, pushes away the cassette recorders so he can put down his papers, removes his jacket, lights a lamp and sets off at full speed. His voice is strong and effective, amplified by loudspeakers that are the only concession to modernism in a hall that is barely lit by light spread from stucco bowls. The hall has three hundred places and there are five hundred people packed together, filling the smallest free space . . . There is no oratorical effect. It is clear and terribly effective. There is absolutely no concession to impro- visation. Foucault has twelve hours each year to explain in a pub- lic course the direction taken by his research in the year just ended. So everything is concentrated and he fills the margins like correspondents who have too much to say for the space available to them. At 19. 15 Foucault stops. The students rush towards his desk; not to speak to him, but to stop their cassette recorders. There are no questions. In the pushing and shoving Foucault is alone. Foucault remarks: "It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude . . . "6
Foucault approached his teaching as a researcher: explorations for a future book as well as the opening up of fields of problematization were formulated as an invitation to possible future researchers. This is why the courses at the College de France do not duplicate the published books. They are not sketches for the books even though both books and courses
? share certain themes. They have their own status. They arise from a specific discursive regime within the set of Foucault's "philosophical activities. " In particular they set out the programme for a genealogy of knowledge/power relations, which are the terms in which he thinks of his work from the beginning of the 1970s, as opposed to the programme of an archeology of discursive formations that previously orientated his work. 7
The courses also performed a role in contemporary reality. Those who followed his courses were not only held in thrall by the narrative that unfolded week by week and seduced by the rigorous exposition, they also found a perspective on contemporary reality. Michel Foucault's art con- sisted in using history to cut diagonally through contemporary reality. He could speak of Nietzsche or Aristotle, of expert psychiatric opinion or the Christian pastoral, but those who attended his lectures always took from what he said a perspective on the present and contemporary events. Foucault's specific strength in his courses was the subtle interplay between learned erudition, personal commitment, and work on the event.
*
With their development and refinement m the 1970s, Foucault's desk was quickly invaded by cassette recorders. The courses--and some seminars--have thus been preserved.
This edition is based on the words delivered in public by Foucault. It gives a transcription of these words that is as literal as possible. 8 We would have liked to present it as such. However, the transition from an oral to a written presentation calls for editorial intervention: At the very least it requires the introduction of punctuation and division into para- graphs. Our principle has been always to remain as close as possible to the course actually delivered.
Summaries and repetitions have been removed whenever it seemed to be absolutely necessary. Interrupted sentences have been restored and faulty constructions corrected. Suspension points indicate that the recording is inaudible. When a sentence is obscure there is a conjectural integration or an addition between square brackets. An asterisk directing the reader to the bottom of the page indicates a significant divergence between the notes used by Foucault and the words actually
Foreword xi
? xii FOREWORD
uttered. Quotations have been checked and references to the texts used are indicated. The critical apparatus is limited to the elucidation of obscure points, the explanation of some allusions and the clarification of critical points. To make the lectures easier to read, each lecture is pre ceded by a brief summary that indicates its principal articulations. 9
The text of the course is followed by the summary published by the Annuaire du College de France. Foucault usually wrote these in June, some time after the end of the course. It was an opportunity for him to pick out retrospectively the intention and objectives ol the course. It consti tutes the best introduction to the course.
Each volume ends with a "context" for which the course editors are responsible. It seeks to provide the reader with elements of the bio- graphical, ideological, and political context, situating the course within the published work and providing indications concerning its place within the corpus used in order to facilitate understanding and to avoid misinterpretations that might arise from a neglect of the circumstances in which each course was developed and delivered.
Psychiatric Power, the course delivered in 1973 and 1974, is edited by Jacques Lagrange.
*
A new aspect of Michel Foucault's "oeuvre" is published with this edition of the College de France courses.
Strictly speaking it is not a matter of unpublished work, since this edition reproduces words uttered publicly by Foucault, excluding the often highly developed written material he used to support his lectures. Daniel Defert possesses Michel Foucault's notes and he is to be warmly thanked for allowing the editors to consult them.
This edition of the College de France courses was authorized by Michel Foucault's heirs who wanted to be able to satisfy the strong demand for their publication, in France as elsewhere, and to do this under indisputably responsible conditions. The editors have tried to be equal to the degree ol conlidence placed in them.
FRANCOIS EWALD AND ALESSANDRO FONTANA
? 1. Michel Foucault concluded a short document drawn up in support of his candidacy with these words: "We should undertake the history ol systems of thought. " "Titres et travaux," in Dils et Ecrits, 195/l-19S8, four volumes, ed.
