The History of Madness (HM) is Michel Foucault's first major work, his longest single work, and the work that established his reputation in France. Foucault distinguishes four distinct components or forms of consciousness of madness: (1) the critical: the normative judgment which distinguishes and sanctions madness in its difference from reason or sanity; (2) the practical: an attitude of collective demarcation and exclusion of the deviant from a group; (3) the enunciative: the act of recognizing individuals (...) as mad and identifying them as such; (4) the analytic: reflection on the nature and forms of manifestation of madness. Foucault thinks that the experience of madness in the Classical Age is characterized by a dissociation between the first two elements, on the one hand, and the latter two on the other. (shrink)

This essay focuses on three moments in Foucault's lifelong engagement with the pressing political question of the relationship between power and the subject. The first moment involves Foucault's examination of madness and Foucault's account of the relationship between the social‐institutional and conceptual exclusion of madness and the constitution of the rational subject in modernity, as this is articulated in the History of Madness (HM). The second moment focuses on Foucault's later account of subjection and normalization, as (...) presented in Foucault's famous genealogical works, Discipline and Punish (DP) and History of Sexuality (HS). Foucault's lectures on Psychiatric Power (C‐PP) serve as a bridge between these first two moments. The third moment involves Foucault's exploration of technologies of the self in the context of ancient Greek and Roman ethics. There is a movement to Foucault's thought from madness as the condition of impossibility of thought to disciplinary subjection to the Stoic idea of conversion. (shrink)