Matthew
> First, it's my impression that Foucault at one point acknowledged that
> people living under the description "mental illness" may be suffering
> in important respects, but that the reality or unreality of that fact
> was largely irrelevant to his project. I seem to recall seeing this in
> an interview, but don't recall where.
>
I don't think he quite saw it that way. In fact one could argue that it is
Foucault's outrage at the suffering of the mentally ill and other
marginalised people that underpins this intellectual work. I think I know
the interview you mean - I can't remember which one - but he would have been
trying to distinguish what he was doing from existential or phenomenological
work.
See his 1977 'The Lives of Infamous Men' (in Power Essential Works vol 3).
where he mentions 'the resonance I still experience today when I happen to
encounter these lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that
struck them down' (p. 158)
See also 'Reponse a Derrida' (Dits et ecrits item 104) where in a fairly
heated response to Derrida he notes that for Derrida his work on madness
must seem 'naive indeed ... in wanting to undertake this history on the
basis of these derisory events which are the enclosure of some tens of
thousands of people or the organisation of an extra-judiciary State police'
(p. 283)
> --
> Clare
> *******************************************
> Clare O'Farrell
> http://www.michel-foucault.com
> *******************************************
>
> First, it's my impression that Foucault at one point acknowledged that
> people living under the description "mental illness" may be suffering
> in important respects, but that the reality or unreality of that fact
> was largely irrelevant to his project. I seem to recall seeing this in
> an interview, but don't recall where.
>
I don't think he quite saw it that way. In fact one could argue that it is
Foucault's outrage at the suffering of the mentally ill and other
marginalised people that underpins this intellectual work. I think I know
the interview you mean - I can't remember which one - but he would have been
trying to distinguish what he was doing from existential or phenomenological
work.
See his 1977 'The Lives of Infamous Men' (in Power Essential Works vol 3).
where he mentions 'the resonance I still experience today when I happen to
encounter these lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that
struck them down' (p. 158)
See also 'Reponse a Derrida' (Dits et ecrits item 104) where in a fairly
heated response to Derrida he notes that for Derrida his work on madness
must seem 'naive indeed ... in wanting to undertake this history on the
basis of these derisory events which are the enclosure of some tens of
thousands of people or the organisation of an extra-judiciary State police'
(p. 283)
> --
> Clare
> *******************************************
> Clare O'Farrell
> http://www.michel-foucault.com
> *******************************************
>