book data
1,078 ratings,
4.03
average rating, 64 reviews
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published
November 28th 1988
(first published 1971)
by Vintage
binding
Paperback, 320 pages
isbn
067972110X
(isbn13: 9780679721109)
description
Perhaps the French philosopher's masterpiece, which is concerned with an extraordinary question: What does it mean to be mad?
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avg 4.03
editions: all | this edition
editions: all | this edition
08/11/08
Jessica
added it
recommended to Jessica by:
crazy people; smart people (quelle est la différence?)
recommends it for: crazy smart people; smart, crazy people
recommends it for: crazy smart people; smart, crazy people
A last question remains: In the name of what can this fundamental language be regarded as a delirium? Granting that it is the truth of madness, what makes it true madness and the originating form of insanity? Why should it be in this discourse, whose forms we have seen to be so faithful to the rules of reason, that we find all those signs which will most manifestly declare the very absence of reason?
A central question, but one to which the classical age has not formulated a direct an...more
A central question, but one to which the classical age has not formulated a direct an...more
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15 comments
Read in May, 2008
So far I'm about fifty or sixty pages in, and I've completely lost track of what this gibbering madman is raving about. Perhaps this is a poor translation, but after the first ten pages even individual sentences are meaningless and syntactically ambiguous. I re-read paragraphs, sometimes ten or twelve times, but I simply can't make any of this make any sense. I'll slog through for a couple more chapters to see if it gets any better, but I don't have much hope for this basket of word salad.
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9 comments
Total garbage. I needed it for an English project at college but it's going straight to a charity shop fairly soon now that I'm doing a science degree and I don't have to read this kind of hideous crap any more. In fact, why is this book so popular and so respected in academic circles? As far as I could see, it was just a load of garbled nonsense and blatant contradiction rolled up with some confused historical narrative and descriptions of mental disorders, with a good dose of bullshit.
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Read in January, 2005
It is said that Foucault enjoyed being whipped.
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Read in September, 2008
recommends it for:
Francophiles, Medical Historians
Foucault’s discursive approach, in which little is explained, left too many loose ends for me to say I liked this book. Starting the first chapter gave me the feeling that I had missed 15 unseen chapters and was picking up in the middle of something.
This book, its meaning fixed firmly within the firmament of French culture, left me sweating to make sense of remarks such as --
“Pierre Dupuis, whom Régnier mentions in his sixth satire, is, according to Brascambille, ...more
This book, its meaning fixed firmly within the firmament of French culture, left me sweating to make sense of remarks such as --
“Pierre Dupuis, whom Régnier mentions in his sixth satire, is, according to Brascambille, ...more
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Read in March, 2008
recommends it for:
those interested in foucault, psychiatric history, western philosophy
however entitled i am to critique foucault, here goes: the man should have stayed away from arts criticism. this book, in its excavation of medical, legal, and philosophic thoughts on what it would mean to be mad from the 16th to 19th century (and how that impacts the present), is thoroughgoing and illuminating. i am especially drawn to the evidence he provides on the relationship between "madness" and labor; one's ability/desire to work as a determinant of who would be confined, and ...more
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Philosophy for Foucault is a discourse, I guess a series of texts that cluster around a single topic and have a meaning as much based on their history as their current ‘meaning’. It is too easy to get tangled in knots with words here – but this book is actually quite a simple read and incredibly interesting.
There is the bit that is often quoted - the idea that hysteria was once considered to be a woman’s madness caused by her womb wandering around her body and thereby caus...more
There is the bit that is often quoted - the idea that hysteria was once considered to be a woman’s madness caused by her womb wandering around her body and thereby caus...more
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01/21/09
Andrew
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Read in January, 2009
There's none of the overarching brilliance of "Discipline and Punish," but it remains a valuable read. Foucault is one hell of a researcher, and this gleams with his skill. Also, I really value his general spatial awareness, especially at a time when other critical thinkers (Bloch, Lukacs, etc.) were actively anti-space. All the familiar Foucault touchstones are here-- isolation, archaeology, the failures of the Enlightenment-- and, as always, they haunt your perspectives.
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Read in January, 2009
recommended to Christopher by:
my wayward course of life
I am working my way very sporadically through Didier Eribon's Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, which is readable enough and very persuasive in some respects. It's especially (but maybe too simplistically) compelling in its assertion that gay identities are formed in the matrix of a discourse in which the identity is an insult, an epithet - "fag," etc.
Eribon reads everything through Foucault, and I find myself going back to books by Foucault as I get to chapter Eribon...more
Eribon reads everything through Foucault, and I find myself going back to books by Foucault as I get to chapter Eribon...more
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I was able to grasp the concepts in this work more clearly than MF's Order of Things. This is a text that has given me a lot to think about over the years as a voting citizen. What does it say about our society where we put the people considered dangerous, whether it be to themselves or others? What do our physical institutions say about our philosophical truths?
Read and ponder, and ponder.
Read and ponder, and ponder.
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Read in April, 2009
I think this book is very useful in terms of things one might want to think about, but Foucault perhaps partially because he was an academic and not a clinician, and partially because of the times, is not very rigorous in his research or concerned with usual standards of... not exactly proof... he just doesn't feel the need to explain or justify his connections; he expects you to follow wherever he leads. Part of this is definitely that if one ever did read Rameau's Nephew it was in school like...more
Read in July, 2008
While it seems that Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 are widely considered Foucault's great achievements as a philosopher-cum-social-scientist, Madness and Civilization is the most enjoyable and coherent book, and it's also the least pretentious. It's straight social history with an eye to modern-day relevancy, and it does an amazing job of showing how our ideas about reason and unreason were formed in the 17th and 18th centuries. But most importantly -- for the enjoyme...more
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A la fois chemin érudit et historique et point de vue analytique absolument novateur. Sans pour autant avoir une écriture relâchée, sans pour autant écrire un texte abscon, tout est compréhensible et cohérent. Etrange pour une folie ! -_-'
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02/05/09
Christopherdhayward
added it
Very interesting so far talking about how mental institutions started. They were previously places for the unemployed and how scientists and doctors started classifying mental disorders such as melancholia and dementia
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04/24/09
Chris
is currently reading it
Read in April, 2009
Dense but worthy. Did you know that the phrase "ship of fools" dates to the time when they'd round up all the town crazies, put them on a ship, and send them out to sea. Back then it was known as "therapy."
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Read in March, 2008
Foucault is an brilliant Historian who charts the progress or lack of it of the treatment of the mentally ill. Read to be disturbed at how they were treated.
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Read in January, 1998
Probably my favorite by Foucault -- but that's just because I was obsessed with the insanity defense for a while.
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Read in January, 2009
Perhaps because he's referenced incessantly in many a stodgy work, I developed an imaginary review of this book before I even started--it went something like, "Blah blah blah...hence, Foucault's endeavor involves a crucial measure of risk...blah blah blah...presupposing a fundamental bifurcation...blah blah blah...disentanglement and de-sanitization of certain unsettling facts...blah blah blah...look, I read it."
But now, though I'm only on p. 7, I'm remembering that Foucault ...more
But now, though I'm only on p. 7, I'm remembering that Foucault ...more
Read in August, 2007
The unabridged version, "The History of Madness," is much better (and much thicker).
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quotes from this book
"People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does."
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