Book, History of Madness in the Classical Age[LS]

Since its launch in 1961, History of Madness brought clearly the idea of ​​carrying out the archeology of the domain of unreason and of narrating, in a critical way, the changes in the status of mad people in society since the Middle Ages, in order to explain how techniques operate. exclusion. He highlights, for example, that it was by no means medicine that defined the boundaries between reason and madness; however, since the 19th century, it has been doctors who have been responsible for monitoring this border and guarding its gate. They affixed the label “mental illness” to it, an indication that serves as a ban and a curse. History of Madness made Michel Foucault famous and started a controversy that still persists and that would flare up when he included, in the second enlarged edition of the book, his reply to Jacques Derrida (the edition that the reader now holds in his hands, revised and enlarged, contains the three versions of the responses to Derrida). Because, when tracing a history of limits – this division that is produced through many others, such as those defined by production, family structure, moral constraints, sexuality – “by which a culture rejects something that will be the Outside for it”, the The author calls into question rationality and, thus, the very foundations of our time. Critical of self-absorbed reason and imprisoned madness, this classic of modern philosophy remains as alive as the controversy it sparked.