Histoire De La Folie Research Articles

Confinement, the Family Institution, and the Case of Claire de Duras's Ourika

Confinement, the Family Institution, and the Case of Claire de Duras's Ourika Michelle Chilcoat THE FRENCH REVOLUTION OF 1789 momentarily offered hope to women fighting for equal education, financial independence and, above all, a political voice. Legislation produced in the wake of the Revolution, however, made it illegal for women to enter the public education system, to vote, and to form political clubs. When the Convention Nationale revised the Revolutionary Constitution in 1793, a reporter for the Comité de Législation clarified what was meant by "citoyen français": L'idée générale que réveille le mot de citoyen est celle de membre de la cité, de la société civile, de la nation. Dans un sens rigoureux il signifie seulement ceux qui sont admis à exercer les droits politiques, à voter dans les assemblées du peuple, ceux qui peuvent élire et être élus aux emplois publiques; en un mot, les membres du souverain. Ainsi les enfants, les insensés, les mineurs, les femmes, les condamnés à peine afflictive ou infamante, jusqu'à leur réhabilitation, ne seraient pas des citoyens.1 Sharing the same status as children, criminals and the insane, woman's "place" in the new French society had to be more narrowly defined than ever. Accordingly, the Convention decreed that woman belongs "in the family," and that she needs no education beyond that of the domestic order: Le projet de la loi ne s'occupe pas de l'instruction des filles.... Ne sait-on pas... que c'est dans les familles que cet apprentissage domestique, comme celui des ouvrages qui conviennent aux filles s'établit naturellement? (Duhet, 200) Women who continued to voice what were deemed political concerns faced imprisonment, institutionalization and even execution. Women intellectuals of the ensuing Restoration period still found ways to articulate concerns regarding their social well-being, but as a consequence of Revolutionary legislation could only do so from within the confines of domesticity and the family, rather than out in the public/political sphere. The purpose of this essay is to examine how the institutionalization of the poor, the criminal, and the insane, the promotion of the bourgeois family as society's most highly esteemed institution , and legislation confining women to the domestic space all emerge as instances of the repressive power of the institution that characterizes France's Fall 1998 Chilcoat "âge classique" (which, according to Foucault, extends from the mid-seventeenth century to the turn of the eighteenth). In the last section of this essay, I propose a reading of Claire de Duras's Ourika (1823)2 as a tragic Restoration narrative of confinement in which the protagonist's inability to identify herself beyond the constraints of family relations ultimately kills her. In Histoire de la folie Michel Foucault describes the "grand refermement" that took place in mid-seventeenth-century France when the foundation of the "Hôpital général" was decreed.3 Foucault theorizes that an economic imperative motivated this Great Confinement. In Renaissance France, the poor and the lunatic, regarded as blessed by God, were left to wander about, depending on the good will of others to sustain their existence. By the mid-seventeenth century, however, the numbers of wandering poor dramatically increased as a result of rampant unemployment in rapidly growing cities. No longer blessed in their poverty, the poor became responsible for their own misery, now said to derive from a moral inadequacy made manifest, above all, in an unwillingness to work (Foucault, 77). The jobless poor were therefore confined to the "Hôpital général" which, Foucault notes, was not yet conceived as a place of medical care, but rather as "une instance de l'ordre .. .monarchique et bourgeois " (61), rendered necessary not by "le souci de la guérison" but by "un impératif du travail" (75). Confinement had two goals, depending on whether the confined was labelled morally good or morally evil. For the morally good, confinement was an act of good will, a compensatory opportunity given to the interned to work and to contribute to society's (and consequently his or her own) economic well-being. For the morally evil, confinement and enforced labor served as a...

Foucault, Derrida, and the history of madness: notes on a controversy

The publication of the book Folie et Déraison. Histoire de la Folie à l'Age Classique (1961), by Michel Foucault, sparked a debate between the author and philosopher Jacques Derrida during the 1960s and 70s. Derrida criticized the methodological proposal and organization of the History of Madness presented by Foucault in the foreword to the first edition. The controversy appears to have motivated the author to withdraw this same foreword from the second edition. The purpose of this article is to analyze some current points in this controversy. It also presents a research agenda for an understanding of the reasons leading Foucault to take this stance.

On "Histoire de la folie" as an Event

The introduction to L'Usage des plaisirs as well as Michel Foucault's interview with Frangois Ewald were judged by certain commentators at the time of the philosopher's death to be a kind of admission of his conversion to a new historical problematic.' Reading the end of that introduction closely, however, it in fact appears that Foucault had not ceased to propose as the object of his historical research the conditions in which human beings 'problematize' what they are, what they do, and the world in which they live.2 In 1977, in VWrite et pouvoir, Foucault confided that his personal problem since Histoire de lafolie had been to seek, from the side of power, the explanation of certain practices for which the guarantee had formerly been sought from the side of specific scientific values.3

Report from Mr. Canguilhem on the Manuscript Filed by Mr. Michel Foucault, Director of the Institut Français of Hamburg, in Order to Obtain Permission to Print His Principal Thesis for the Doctor of Letters

Previous articleNext article No AccessGeorges Canguilhem on Michel Foucault's "Histoire de la folie"Report from Mr. Canguilhem on the Manuscript Filed by Mr. Michel Foucault, Director of the Institut Français of Hamburg, in Order to Obtain Permission to Print His Principal Thesis for the Doctor of LettersGeorges Canguilhem and Ann HobartGeorges Canguilhem Search for more articles by this author and Ann Hobart Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 21, Number 2Winter, 1995 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448750 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 1995 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Beyond Ethnography: Anthropology as Nominalism

Much has been made (a good deal of it salutary) of the experimental moment in anthropology, of a heightened awareness of the text, of discourse, of the anthropologist as ethnographer and critic, of a postmodern polyphony of voices, of the end of meta-narratives, of dispersal and subversion, of metaphors and allegories and tropes, of Orient and Occident. Meanwhile. And what if anthropology has not dispersed into ethnography, voices not displaced analyses, tropes not triumphed over concepts'? What if Anthropology-the study of Man, that being who is the subject and object of her own knowledge-proved more enduring than the dulcet denunciations, the muddlers through, and the tropification of the tropics? The articles presented here suggest such a possibility. In order to introduce them we turn first to Michel Foucault, a figure absent from Anthropology as Cultural Critique.' In 1961, Foucault published his major thesis for the doctorat es lettres, Histoire de lafolie a l'age classique as well as a these complementaire entitled Introduction to Kant's Anthropology, a commentary on Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (translated by Foucault). Throughout his university career Kant taught only two courses with regularity: physical geography, the world as nature (quite popular with students), offered for over 30 years starting in 1756; and anthropology, the world as human, offered for the last 25 years of his teaching career, starting in 1772-73. The Anthropology was published only in 1798, shortly after Kant retired (Foucault 1961). Although Kant's admittedly curious anthropology has not been the subject of extended commentary in contemporary histories of the discipline of critical social thought (Norbert Elias (1982) does indeed mention it), Foucault privileged its potential modernity, seeing in it a refraction of Kant's three critiques on the level of a pragmatics of the everyday. Pragmatic is the key word. Kant distinguishes the practical point of view, which treats the moral community of thinking beings (esprits), from the juridical point of view, which treats civil society as composed of lawful subjects, from the pragmatic which treats man as a citizen of the world, as a concrete universal (Foucault 1961:27). Foucault concluded that Kant's Anthropology occupied a strategic position since it treated a critical truth about Man-the irreducible reality of the diverse forms of the concrete-the daughter, as the phrase goes in French, of the

Madness and Healing in Nineteenth-Century America

One morning in October 1849, a former patient at the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane returned surreptitiously to the asylum from which he had twice escaped in the previous year. Wiley Williams had been an uncooperative patient from the beginning, and although he had defeated his relatives' attempts to confine him, he had formed a settled hatred of the hospital's superintendent, Thomas Story Kirkbride. He climbed a tree near the hospital's main buildings and attracted the attention of Kirkbride's young son, Joseph. The boy dutifully notified his father that there was a man up a tree, and when the superintendent went to investigate, Wiley Williams shot him in the head. Thomas Story Kirkbride wore stiff hats and must have had a hard head: the ball lodged between his skull and his scalp and caused only a superficial wound. Kirkbride was the most distinguished American asylum superintendent of the mid-nineteenth century, and the attempt on his life may serve as an allegory. Ever since the publication of Michel Foucault's Histoire de la folie in 1961, revisionist historians have been taking aim at the treatment movement that Kirkbride championed.1 The Philadelphia Hospital was the showpiece of moral treatment in America, the equivalent of the York Retreat in England and Philip Pinel's asylum practice in France. Kirkbride was one of the leading figures, if not the leading one, among American asylum superintendents and the author of the most influential work on asylum architecture in the period. The first round shot in Kirkbride's direction by a historian was David Rothman's The Discovery of the Asylum (1971); he and his American and English counterparts have since been blasted by Andrew Scull, Richard Fox, and a host of less notable scholars.2 Like Williams, these irregulars are outraged at what they take to be the hypocrisy of men like Kirkbride and the system that they advocated. They believe that in spite of the noble sentiments that the mid-nineteenth-century reformers used to describe their methods,

My Body, This Paper, This Fire

On pages 56-59 of Histoire de la folie I said that dreams and madness have neither the same status nor the same role in the development of Cartesian doubt: dreams allow me to doubt this place where I am, this sheet of paper I see, this hand I hold out ; but madness is not an instrument or stage of doubt; for 7 who am thinking cannot be mad'. Madness is therefore excluded, contrary to the sceptical t radi t ion, which made it one of the reasons for doubting. To sum up Derrida's objection to this thesis, it is no doubt best to quote the passage where he gives most energetically his reading of Descartes.

What <i>Sujet de la folie</i>? Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet’s Search for an Alternative History of Madness

Inspired by three monographs of Gladys Swain and Marcel Gauchet, my presentation traces the rise of the new science of psychiatry in Revolutionary France, with Philippe Pinel and his student J.-E. Esquirol. As the directors of the division of the aliénés in the Hôpital Bicêtre (Paris), Pinel and Esquirol pioneered a therapeutic programme that spread out between their “traitement moral” (reasoning with the passions) and an “energetic repression,” wherever necessary. The discipline they created sought to gain autonomy from medicine treating diseases of the body, much as pathology would do in regard to physiology, some fifty years later. Using Canguilhem, Foucault’s teacher and significant influence, I show how the unfolding of a science of disorders (for Canguilhem, this was pathology) poses questions of taxonomy and runs the inevitable ‘risk’ of extensive fragmentation. This is what happens in France after Pinel. However, Pinel, above all, will have made one contribution that—by Swain and Gauchet’s argument—stands in stark contrast to the theses of the young Foucault. Rather than sequestering and excluding the fou by forcing him or her into exaggerated, discursive revelations or silence, Pinel and Esquirol “discover” the sense, or sens, at the heart of madness, notably in what Pinel called “manie intermittente.” Esquirol takes this discovery one step further, to discern in various attacks, a certain rationality. This rather modern conception of madness exerts a considerable influence on literature, criticism, philosophy, and medicine in their time. Hegel’s understanding of madness will come directly from Pinel, and it will see in folie the internal division of subjective Reason. From this characterization comes a therapeutics based on the conviction that one could often reintegrate the mad into society, and avoid prolonged sequestration and exclusion. Thus the presentation focuses on Swain and Gauchet’s question to Foucault (Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, notably), using the work of Pinel and Hegel to illustrate their claim.