Michel Foucault

This paper examines the problem of alternatives to the prison in order to problematize the prison as an institution, as a form of punishment and as a system for promoting respect for the law. It argues that the mechanisms that were central to the prison during the 19th century, such as the practice of penitence as a principle of rehabilitation, the family as agent of correction, or as agent of legality, and labour as a fundamental instrument for punishment, still operate today, if in altered forms, in both the conventional and alternatives types of prison. The prison has been a factory for producing criminals; this production is not a mark of its failure but of its success. Prison manages control over illegalities by means of a whole set of apparatuses that manage their reorganization, redistributing them according to an economy of illegalisms. It may well be that changes in the economy and in the mechanisms for regulating populations mean that the carceral functions of the prison are today being disseminated at the level of the social body, so that they would now operate beyond the space of the prison through multiple instances of control, surveillance, normalization and re-socialization. The question of the prison cannot be resolved or even posed in terms of a simple penal theory. Neither can it be posed in tems of a psychology or sociology of crime. The question of the role and possible disappearance of the prison can only be posed in terms of an economy and a politics, that is, a political economy of illegalisms.

Michel Foucault is generally considered one of the most brilliant and influential philosophers of the twentieth century, yet much of his writing has remained unpublished and/or unavailable in English. It is only recently that the French publisher Gallimard issued Dis et Ecrits, the first complete collection of everything Foucault published outside of his monographs. Ethics, the first of three volumes in the collection, provides a lucid and accessible overview of Foucault's work. Included in the first section of this volume are his groundbreaking analyses of penal institutions, psychiatry, "biopolitics," and the modern subject. A second section contains interviews, along with Foucault's key writings on ethics. Winner of the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award.

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures—which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice—provide the missing link between Foucault’s early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the \u201ccriminal\u201d was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice.   Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought. &nbsp

'A fabulous journey through thirty years of political and intellectual ferment... will reorient our reading of Foucault's major works' Didier Eribon The Essential Works of Michel Foucault offers the definitive collection of his articles, interviews and seminars from across thirty years of his extraordinary career. This first volume, Ethics, contains the summaries of Foucault's renowned courses at the Collège de France, as well as key writings and candid interviews on ethical matters: from the role of the intellectual and philosopher in society to friendship, sexuality and the care of the self and others. Edited by Paul Rabinow Translated by Robert Hurley and Others.

This article is a transcript of a conversation between Michel Foucault and Jonathan Simon in San Francisco in October 1983. It has never previously been published and is transcribed on the basis of a tape recording made at the time. Foucault and Simon begin with a discussion of Foucault’s 1977 lecture ‘About the Concept of the “Dangerous Individual” in 19th-Century Legal Psychiatry’, and move to a discussion of notions of danger, psychiatric expertise in the prosecution cases, crime, responsibility and rights in the US and French legal systems. The transcription is accompanied by a brief contextualizing introduction and a retrospective comment by Simon.

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l'âge Classique , few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization , Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world. This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition. History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined? Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud. The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them

The second volume in an unprecedented publishing event: the complete College de France lectures of one of the most influential thinkers of the last century Michel Foucault remains among the towering intellectual figures of postmodern philosophy. His works on sexuality, madness, the prison, and medicine are classics his example continues to challenge and inspire. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous College de France. These lectures were seminal events. Attended by thousands, they created benchmarks for contemporary critical inquiry. 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 the first volume of this series, Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century, shaping the institutions--from the prison system to the family--meant to deal in particular with “monstrosity,” whether sexual, phsyical, or spiritual. The College de France lectures add immeasurably to our appreciation of Foucault's thought, and offer a unique window on his singular worldview.

«La recherche ici entreprise implique donc le projet délibéré d’être à la fois historique et critique, dans la mesure où il s’agit, hors de toute intention prescriptive, de déterminer les conditions de possibilité de l’expérience médicale telle que l’époque moderne l’a connue. Une fois pour toutes, ce livre n’est pas écrit pour une médecine contre une autre, ou contre la médecine pour une absence de médecine. Ici comme ailleurs, il s’agit d’une étude qui essaie de dégager dans l’épaisseur du discours les conditions de son histoire.» (Michel Foucault) Naissance de la clinique constitue aussi, à travers une analyse historique et critique de la constitution du sujet, le malade, tel qu’il peut devenir objet de connaissance, la naissance d’une oeuvre philosophique qui va marquer durablement la pensée contemporaine internationale.