[The collection from which this excerpt is taken was originally published in 1964 under the title Essais critiques.]
[In Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, Foucault] has not written the history of madness, as he says, in a style of positivity: from the start he has refused to consider madness as a nosographic reality which has always existed and to which the scientific approach has merely varied from century to century. Indeed Foucault never defines madness; madness is not the object of knowledge, whose history must be rediscovered; one might say instead that madness is nothing but this knowledge itself: madness is not a disease, it is a variable and perhaps heterogeneous meaning, according to the period; Foucault never treats madness except as a functional reality: for him it is the pure function of a couple formed by reason and unreason, observer and observed. And the observer (the man of reason) has no objective privilege over the observed (the madman). It would thus be futile to try to find the modern names for dementia under its old names.
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Foucault, Michel 1926–1984: Critical Essay by Roland Barthes Access Pass.
