In this paper, I take issue with the idea that Michel Foucault might be considered a theorist of epistemic injustice, and argue that his philosophical premises are incompatible with Miranda Fricker’s. Their main disagreement rests upon their divergent ways of conceiving the relationship between reason and power, giving rise to the contrasting forms of normativity that characterize their critical projects. This disagreement can be helpfully clarified by addressing the different use they make of the genealogical method. While Fricker’s genealogy of (...) Testimonial Justice aims to ground her claim that reason and power can be neatly pulled apart, thus avoiding the reductionist and relativist conclusions entailed by Foucault’s genealogies, I argue that Foucault’s mature, overlooked definition of genealogy is based on a sophisticated distinction between games and regimes of truth, and is thus not vulnerable to these criticisms. Consequently, Foucault’s genealogical inquiries prove helpful for understanding issues that normally fall under the umbrella of epistemic injustice in a new light, while also allowing us to avoid some of the main objections that threaten Fricker’s project. (shrink)

This article challenges the consensus that silences about mental disorders are there to be broken. While silence in mental disorders can be painful, even deadly, the consensus rests on an oversimplified understanding of silence. Drawing upon accounts from depression and bipolar memoirs, this article names and analyses some salient experiences of silence in mood disorders. It does so with two goals in mind. The first is to show that mood disorders may involve several different kinds of lived experiences of silence. (...) This is important because even though silence is considered a promising objective symptom of depression, little has been written about lived experiences of silence in disorders that involve depression. The second is to argue against the fetishisation of breaking silence and the concomitant understandings of silence as an externally imposed and inherently negative phenomenon. This is important because some silences are not experienced as external and are even felt to be valuable, meaning that efforts to break them may be counterproductive. (shrink)

What form does power take in situations of retaliation against whistleblowers? In this article, we move away from dominant perspectives that see power as a resource. In place, we propose a theory of normative power and violence in whistleblower retaliation, drawing on an in-depth empirical study. This enables a deeper understanding of power as it circulates in complex processes of whistleblowing. We offer the following contributions. First, supported by empirical findings we propose a novel theoretical framing of whistleblower retaliation and (...) the role of mental health, which draws upon poststructuralist psychoanalytic thinking. Specifically, we highlight how intra- and inter-psychic affective and ambivalent attachments to organizations influence the use of normative violence in cases of whistleblower retaliation. The second contribution is empirical and builds upon the existing literature on whistleblower retaliation by highlighting how organizations position whistleblower subjects as mentally unstable and unreliable individuals, to undermine their claims. We conclude by highlighting the implications of normative power for the outcomes of whistleblower struggles. (shrink)

Enactive approaches to psychiatry have recently argued for an understanding of psychiatric conditions based within relational interactions between individuals and their environments. A central motivation for these enactive approaches is the goal of social integration: the integration of a naturalistic approach to psychiatric conditions with their broader sociocultural dimensions. One possible issue, however, is whether appeals to the autonomy and authenticity of relationally constituted enactive individuals can provide a means of adjudicating between harmful and beneficial social constraints upon individual behaviour. (...) This paper seeks to provide enactive approaches to psychiatry with a possible means of evaluating normative influences of social contexts beyond direct interactions with relationally constituted individuals. Some of the most significant influences of the sociocultural dimension of psychiatric conditions consist not in direct interaction with individuals, but in setting the terms for interactions and interactants alike. Insofar as some social influences precede and predefine dyadic relations between individuals and their social context, these cannot be accounted for as features of interactions, but must be assessed as independent structures of the sociocultural dimension. I will provide one potential means for enactive models to assess social norms using Canguilhem’s distinction between health and pathology. I will argue that Canguilhem’s conceptualization of health in terms of adaptive normative structure provides a potential tool for social integration which strongly complements enactive approaches to psychiatry. (shrink)

Metaphysical realism about mental disorder is the thesis that mental disorder exists mind-independently. There are two ways to challenge metaphysical realism about mental disorder. The first is by denying that mental disorder exists. The second is by denying that mental disorder exists mind-independently. Or, differently put, by arguing that mental disorder is mind-dependent. The aim of this paper is three-fold: (a) to examine three ways in which mental disorder can be said to be mind-dependent (namely, by being causally dependent on (...) the human mind, by being weakly dependent on human attitudes, and by being strongly dependent on human attitudes), (b) to clarify their differences, and (c) to discuss their implications regarding metaphysical realism about mental disorder. I argue that mental disorder being mind-dependent in the first two senses is compatible with metaphysical realism about mental disorder, whereas mental disorder being mind-dependent in the third sense is not. (shrink)

Madness can be understood as something sealed off from the intelligible human world, a way of being that has been detached and isolated from the essential elements of normative society. It can represent all that is contrary to what is rational, what is normal and even, what is human. By following this line of thinking, madness cannot be penetrated by the outside nor does it have an established internal structure, and yet it can be used to construct and form its (...) opposite—the rational, normal human. Human rationality then becomes something that can be fully deduced, explained, and understood, and anything that contains mystery or ambiguity can be relegated to the realm of madness.These are the common definitions of... (shrink)

Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars proposed the well-known scientia mensura dictum. The tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is what I shall define as a historico-practical (...) conception of science. I will build this concept by tracing a connection between the Foucauldian notion of “conditions of possibility” of science and Sellars’s thesis about the “indispensability” of the manifest image. Finally, I will argue that this conception of science problematizes the clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world, paving the way for a different relationship between naturalism and critical theory. (shrink)

Interaction between humans and cats in urban environments is subject to dynamic change. Based on the frequency and quality of relations with humans, we can distinguish several populations of domestic cats : pedigree, pet, semi-feral, feral, and pseudo-wild. Bringing together theoretical perspectives of the Tartu school of biosemiotics and ethological studies of animal societies, we distinguish two basic types of cat cultures: the culture of street cats and the humano-cat culture of pets. The difference between these cultures is documented on (...) the level of zoosemiotic interactions, ecological relations, and human representations. We introduce a threefold model of human-animal interactions in urban environments which steer a careful course between the Scylla of realistic ontology and the Charybdis of social constructivism. A case study on Estonian cat shelters illustrates the significance of cultural representations and institutionalized actions in human-cat cohabitation. (shrink)

It is widely known that by the end of the 1970s, Foucault had begun to refer to ‘experience’ to account for his intellectual trajectory and to redirect the work on The History of Sexuality. However, the interest in experience also decisively shaped Foucault’s analysis of the ‘critical attitude’ that he explicitly started to address at about the same time. The article argues that Foucault’s notion of critique is informed by a specific reading and understanding of ‘experience’. Experience is conceived of (...) as dominant structure and transformative force, as existing background of practices and transcending event, as the object of theoretical inquiry and the objective of moving beyond historical limits. Foucault defines experience as a dynamic interplay between games of truth, forms of power and relations to the self. Accordingly, the Foucauldian account of critique is characterized by three aspects: the activity of problematization, the art of voluntary insubordination, and the audacity to expose one’s own status as a subject. While the first section of the article briefly reconstructs the trajectory of ‘experience’ in Foucault’s work from the 1960s to the 1980s, the main part discusses the dimensions and implications of this ‘experimental’ critique. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis paper compares Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic critical realism and Michel Foucault’s implicit discursive realism. It argues that there is a surprisingly high degree of correspondence between the two social ontologies. Specifically, both ontologies suggest that there are three largely autonomous domains in operation: cultural, structural, and agentive. Yet, while each of these domains have a level of independence, yet they are also partially constituted by the content and form of the others. This paper discusses the potential to integrate the two (...) approaches in such a way as to overcome their respective short-comings, namely the underdevelopment of culture in Archer’s ontology, and the underdevelopment of social agency in Foucault’s ontology. (shrink)

Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) is a methodology that is well suited to inquiring into nursing knowledge and its organization. It is a critical analytic approach derived from Foucault's histories of science, madness, medicine, incarceration and sexuality, all of which serve to exteriorize or make visible the ‘positive unconscious of knowledge’ penetrating bodies and minds. Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA) holds the potential to reveal who we are today as nurses and as a profession of nursing by facilitating our ability to identify (...) and trace the effects of the discourses that determine the conditions of possibility for nursing practice that are continuously shaping and (re)shaping the knowledge of nursing and the profession of nursing as we know it. In making visible the chain of knowledge that orders the spaces nurses occupy, no less than their subjectivities, FDA is a powerful methodology for inquiring into nursing knowledge based on its provocation of deep critical reflection on the normalizing power of discourse. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView.

In this paper, I examine the relationship between Foucault and psychoanalysis through the lens of problematization. Rather than asking the interpretive question of what was Foucault’s own attitude toward psychoanalysis, I analyze what sort of problem psychoanalysis might be thought to pose for a Foucaultian conception of critique. The bulk of the paper is devoted to a discussion of the three primary dangers that psychoanalysis is typically thought to pose for such a conception; these dangers are grouped under the headings (...) of normalization, the drives, and power. After arguing that these three dangers can be overcome – by which I mean that they do not amount to reasons for believing that psychoanalysis is conceptually incompatible with Foucaultian critique – I then turn to a discussion of how psychoanalytic concepts and categories are related to Foucault’s method of critical problematization. There I argue that psychoanalysis, far from being incompatible with Foucault’s understanding of critique, actually serves as a model for his own critical method understood as a radical approach to writing history. (shrink)

There is a paradox that lies at the heart of every investigation of normality, namely, its dependence on its other (e.g., deviation, break, difference). In this paper, I want to show that this paradox is the reason for the dynamism as well as fragility of normality. In this regard, I will not only argue that every normality is fragile, but also that normality can only be established because it is fragile. In the first part of this paper, I will present (...) and re-visit Husserl’s account of normality as concordant and optimal with regard to its dynamic or fragile aspects. In the second part of this paper, I will apply this account to recent findings in phenomenological pathology regarding schizophrenia and depression to show how Husserl’s account could be helpful for differentiating between different aspects (such as concordance and optimality) as well as genetic levels of (disturbances of) normality. (shrink)

This paper critically evaluates Foucault’s relation to Bachelard and Canguilhem. It reconsiders the relevance of the concept of “influence” for treating this relation in order to register the more sceptical position Foucault adopts towards knowledge practices than either of these figures from twentieth-century French epistemology.

While philosophy has been defined as a critical endeavour since Plato, the critical potential of rhetoric has been mostly overlooked. In recent years, critique itself – as a means of enlightenment and emancipation – has come under attack. While there have been various attempts to renew and strengthen critical theory and practice, rhetoric has not yet played a part in these attempts. Addressing this lacuna, the article argues that rhetoric can function as a critical force within philosophy. The rhetorical perspective (...) confronts the claim to rational discourse and universal knowledge with the contingency of philosophical languages, means of representation, and social practices. Moreover, it allows us to think of critique as an activity of a subject that is at the same time constituted and transformed by it. This opens up the possibility of a rhetorical philosophizing that meets its critical standards by taking into account both the conditions of its own speaking and what it must exclude as its ‘other’ in order to function. (shrink)

This article will briefly explore some of the ways in which the past has been used as a means to talk about psychotherapy as a practice and as a profession, its impact on individuals and society, and the ethical debates at stake. It will show how, despite the multiple and competing claims about psychotherapy’s history and its meanings, historians themselves have, to a large degree, not attended to the intellectual and cultural development of many therapeutic approaches. This absence has the (...) potential consequence of implying that therapies have emerged as value-free techniques, outside of a social, economic and political context. The relative neglect of psychotherapy, by contrast with the attention historians have paid to other professions, particularly psychiatry, has also underplayed its societal impact. This article will foreground some of the instances where psychotherapy has become an object of emerging historical interest, including the new research that forms the substance of this special issue of History of the Human Sciences. (shrink)

The phrase ‘To perish from absolute knowledge’ from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil runs like a red thread throughout Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche, spanning a period of 20 years in which Foucault continuously turned to Nietzsche as his main philosophical and methodological role model. Beginning with his first lectures on Nietzsche in the early 1950s, Foucault repeatedly alluded to this phrase as the key to Nietzsche’s philosophical critique which anticipated the philosophical shift to ontology in the 20th century. Drawing on (...) a host of unpublished essays from Foucault’s archive, it will be shown that this phrase holds the key to Foucault’s Nietzsche interpretation and explains his reliance on historicity as the transcendental basis for his critical project. The article will rely on Foucault’s dynamic analysis of this phrase to narrate the development of his historical methodology between the 1950s and the mid-1970s, and will argue for the continuity and coherence of Foucault’s critical project. (shrink)

This essay explores various roles that philosophers occupy in relation to intellectual disability. In examining how philosophers define their object of inquiry as experts and gatekeepers, it raises critical questions concerning the nature of philosophical discourse about intellectual disability. It then goes on to consider three alternate positions, the advocate or friend, the animal, and the “intellectually disabled,” each of which points to new ways of philosophizing in the face of intellectual disability.

In this paper, I give a Kantian answer to the question whether and why it would be inappropriate to blame people suffering from mental disorders that fall within the schizophrenia spectrum. I answer this question by reconstructing Kant’s account of mental disorder, in particular his explanation of psychotic symptoms. Kant explains these symptoms in terms of various types of cognitive impairment. I show that this explanation is plausible and discuss Kant’s claim that the unifying feature of the symptoms is the (...) patient’s inability to enter into an exchange of reasons with others. After developing a Kantian Quality of Will Thesis, I analyze some real life cases. Firstly, I argue that delusional patients who are unable to enter into an exchange of epistemic reasons are exempted from doxastic rather than moral responsibility. They are part of the moral community and exonerated from moral blame only if their actions do not express a lack of good will. Secondly, I argue that disorganized patients who are unable to form intentions and to make plans are exempted from moral responsibility because they do not satisfy the conditions for agency. (shrink)

The article began life as, and retains the character of, spoken argument for not allowing the neurosciences to shape the agenda of the history of the human sciences. This argument is then used to suggest purposes and content for the journal, History of the Human Sciences. The style is rhetorical, even polemical, but open-ended. I challenge two clichés about the neurosciences, that they intellectually challenge other areas of knowledge, and that they are reconfiguring the human with the notion of ‘brainhood’. (...) The suggestion is that the real challenges lie elsewhere; specifically with understanding the relations of different forms of knowledge and making it conceivable by political action, or simply mode of life, to implement one way of being human rather than another. The conclusion re-asserts the value of the heading, ‘history of the human sciences’, and of the value of the journal with this name, as a forum in which to reflect on the identity and relations of forms of knowledge about ‘the human’ in all their variety. (shrink)

Existing accounts of Foucault’s archaeological methodology have not (a) contextualized the concept properly within the intellectual field of its emergence and (b) explained why it is called ‘archaeology’ and not simply ‘history’. Foucault contributed to the field of ‘history of systems of thought’ in France around 1960 by broadening its scope from the study of scientific and philosophical systems into systems of ‘knowledge’ in a wider sense. For Foucault, the term ‘archaeology’ provided a response to new methodological questions arising from (...) this initiative. Archaeological methodology had already been developed into a distinct comparative approach for the study of linguistic and cultural systems, notably by Dumézil. Foucault redevised archaeological methodology for the post-Hegelian tradition of studying ‘problems’ prevalent in the history of systems of thought. The article thus furnishes the groundwork for a ‘sociological archaeology’ or ‘problem analysis’ that is not particularly dependent on Foucault as a social theorist of power. (shrink)

Although it is widely acknowledged that Foucault’s accounts of the concept of heterotopia remain briefly sketched and somewhat confusing, the notion has provoked many interpretations and applications across a range of disciplines. In particular, it has been coupled with different stages or processes of modernity and persistently linked to forms of resistance. This article re-examines Foucault’s concept through a close textual analysis. It contrasts heterotopia with Lefebvre’s conceptualization of heterotopy and wider formulations of utopia. Drawing on Foucault’s study of the (...) spaces of literature of Borges, and particularly Blanchot, the article argues that heterotopia refers to varied spatial and temporal disruptions that imaginatively interrogate and undermine certain formulations of utopia. It concludes by outlining how heterotopia contests the space in which we live. (shrink)

Despite its historical focus on aberrant behavior, sexology barely dealt with sexual deviants in 1950s Czechoslovakia. Rather, sexologists treated only isolated instances of deviance. The rare cases that went to court appeared mostly because they hindered work or harmed the national economy. Two decades later, however, the situation was markedly different. Hundreds of men were labeled as sexual delinquents and sentenced for treatment in special sexological wards at psychiatric hospitals. They endangered society, so it was claimed, by being unwilling or (...) unable to conform to the family norm. The mode of subjection shifted from work to family. I analyse this change by using the tools of Gil Eyal’s sociology of expertise (2013), which focuses on shifts in institutional matrices that bring forth new groups of agents creating new expert networks. I argue that sexology became profoundly institutionalized in the early 1970s, which brought the discipline closer to psychiatry and forensic science. New inpatient facilities were opened that could admit sentenced sexual deviants. Also, demographic changes accelerated in the 1960s, especially skyrocketing divorce rates and plummeting birth rates, which made it imperative for the government to focus on cementing the family. After the failed attempts of the Prague Spring in 1968, the new pro-Soviet government of communist Czechoslovakia did just that. During the time dubbed as ‘normalization’ by the new elites, anyone who strayed from the family norm was suspected of deviance. (shrink)

Bioethics influences public policy, scientific research, and clinical practice. Thinkers in Continental traditions have increasingly contributed scholarship to this field, and their approaches allow new insights and alternative normative guidance. In this essay, examples of the following Continental approaches in bioethics are presented and considered: phenomenology and existentialism; deconstruction; Foucauldian methodologies; and biopolitical analyses. Also highlighted are Continental feminisms and the philosophy of disability. Continental approaches are importantly diverse, but those I focus upon here reveal embedded models of individualized autonomy (...) in medical discourses and encourage awareness of medicine's normalizing edges, thereby drawing attention to lacunae in traditional bioethical frameworks. (shrink)

The problem is to reintroduce rhetoric, the rhetorician, the fight of discourse into the field of analysis.... The problem is to "rhetorize" philosophy.Philosophy takes place in the medium of language, in spoken and written discourses, which are themselves given as texts. Texts are written, read, memorized, reproduced, and cited; they circulate and are disseminated, but may also get damaged or lost, censored or forbidden, or become opaque and unreadable. This textual constitution is not a contingent but an essential attribute of (...) Western philosophy. In fact, the staging of dialogic and agonal orality in the medium of text is one of the characteristic features of Greek thought. Thus, the... (shrink)

This article offers a critique and reconstruction of the concept of medicalization. Most researchers describe medicalization as the redefinition of social problems as medical concerns, and track its spread by the proliferation of disease language and diagnostic categories. Forensic psychiatry and disorders like psychopathy are often cited in these debates. I argue that focusing on discourse overlooks how medical language can justify or mask non-medical practices and outcomes, and lead researchers to identify medicalization where it has not occurred. Building on (...) other critiques of medicalization and recent studies of medical and legal expertise, I propose an alternative conception based on conditions for the performance of medical practice and other forms of expert labor. I distinguish the participation or intervention of medical practitioners from the medicalization of expert practice and identify several institutional factors that facilitate the latter. I illustrate this approach using a critical historical case: the first adult penal psychiatric clinic in the United States, founded by the eminent psychopathologist Bernard Glueck at New York’s Sing Sing Prison in 1916. Glueck’s extensive writings reveal little evidence of medicalization: psychopaths were largely defined and diagnosed according to penal rather than medical criteria, and they received additional punishment rather than treatment. A review of recent research confirms that psychopathy remains primarily a penal rather than medical condition. I conclude that focusing studies of medicalization on practice rather than discourse clarifies the concept and avoids reifying the notion of a medicalized society. (shrink)

This positional paper explores the role of personal networks (family and friends) in caring for people with mental health problems. Since the eighties, major changes have been made in the organization and focus of professional mental healthcare. Correspondingly, new expectations and changes in the division of care responsibilities between people with mental health problems, their personal networks and their professional care providers were created. In this paper, I investigate how the transition in mental healthcare changed the allocation of care responsibilities (...) between personal networks, people with mental health problems and professional caregivers. I will consider why care responsibilities of personal networks have been taken for granted in these processes, and discuss whether personal networks should have a more prominent voice in the assignment of care responsibilities, and how this can be done. A theoretical framework of feminist care ethics inspired by scholars such as Margaret Urban Walker, Joan Tronto and Hilde Lindemann is used to reflect on the need for social inclusion. (shrink)

Christians are not immune to psychological and psychiatric illness. Yet, Christians should also be careful not to permit popular cultural trends to shape the way that they think about the use of psychiatric treatment with medication. In this essay, I suggest that the tendencies for default usage of psychiatric medication can be problematic for Christians in contemporary culture where a technological imaginary exists. Modern scientific studies of psychiatric medication are partly constructive of how we imagine ourselves. The typical justification for (...) the usage of technology in contemporary culture is the theme of cocreation with God, where Christians see any usage of technology as equivalent to our participating in God’s ongoing creative activity. I challenge these ideas in the foregoing paper, noting that the modern technological imaginary that animates modern psychiatry is as constricting as it is enabling. I conclude with a different take on what it might mean for Christians to be cocreators with God. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s famous book on madness first appeared in 1961 as Folie et Déraison. When it was reissued in 1972, ‘Déraison’ had dropped from the title, but it remained dense in the text, often capitalized or italicized. No two texts, abridgements, or translations of the madness book are identical with respect to the word. It is translated as ‘unreason’, but what does it mean? How did Foucault use it? Why did he come to downplay it? The relationships between déraison and (...) painting and writing are explored. It is noted that the idea of ‘archaeology of knowledge’ is introduced in connection with a discussion of folie and déraison as displayed in Racine’s Andromaque. (shrink)

In the Letter of Humanism, Heidegger reinterprets the Greek notion of ethos as designating the way in which human beings dwell in the world through a “unifying” language. Through various down strokes in the autobiographical and psychopathological literature on schizophrenia as well as in literary texts and literary criticism, this paper, experimental in its effort, argues that the language productions of schizophrenia and poetry, each in its own way, seem to fall outside this unification of a language in common. Furthermore, (...) it argues that this “falling outside” is related to radical experiences of “alienation” and “otherness,” which call for an alteration of conventional language. However, whereas poetry appears to open new linguistic possibilities, schizophrenia runs the risk of reducing language to the silence of incomprehensible “nonsense.” The paper ends with the suggestion that a poetic employment of language may hold a double potential with regard to the understanding and possible treatment of schizophrenia spectrum disorders. (shrink)

In order to be able to provide informed, effective and responsive mental health care and to do so in an evidence‐based, collaborative and recovery‐focused way with those who use mental health services, there is a recognition of the need for mental health professionals to possess sophisticated critical thinking capabilities. This article will therefore propose that such capabilities can be productively situated within the context of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the most challenging, innovative and influential (...) thinkers of the 20th century. However, rather than focusing exclusively upon the content of Foucault's work, it will be suggested that it is possible to discern a general methodological approach across that work, a methodological approach that he refers to as “the history of the present.” In doing so, Foucault's history of the present can be understood as a productive, albeit provisional, framework in which to orientate the purpose and process of critical thinking for mental health professionals by emphasizing the need to both historicize and politicize the theoretical perspectives and therapeutic practices that characterize contemporary mental health care. (shrink)

The Habermas–Foucault debate, despite the excellent commentary it has generated, has the standing of an ‘unfinished project’ precisely because it occasions the interrogation of the fundamental categories of modernity, and because the lingering sense of anxiety, which continues to remain after arguments and counter-arguments, demands new interpretations. Here, I advance the claim that what gives Habermas’s criticisms of Foucault’s histories and theoretical formulations their bite is the categorial distinction he maintains between facts and rights, and by extension, between causes and (...) reasons. The Kantian distinction between de jure validity and de facto effectivity underwrites the categorial distinction between both ‘norms/facts’ and ‘reasons/causes’ conceptual pairs, which distinction, in turn, is reinforced by a picture of the natural world as matter in motion and human agency as self-determination. I want to claim that Foucault’s work enacts a critique of Habermas not by evading the problem of justification but by undermining the very distinctions Habermas needs to maintain the universal and necessary status of communicative rationality. Drawing on Jonathan Lear’s discussion of reasons and causes in relation to the unconscious, I claim that psychoanalytic discourse helps us make intelligible a type of reflection—such as one finds in Foucault’s historiography—that is at once “critical and empirical.” Moreover, the realization that the distinction between causes and reasons may not be categorial and exhaustive shows how Habermas’s insistence on the contrary leads to one particular kind of misrecognition of our practices. (shrink)

Have we reached what Alexander Galloway dismissively refers to as ‘peak Deleuze’? In this essay, I argue that the arrival at end times – with the sense of mass extinction and philosophy's exhaustion – is indeed a moment of ‘peak Deleuze’, but that this gesture of exhaustion is already implicit in A Thousand Plateaus. Recognising the limits and seduction of a text is never as easy as it seems; every attempt to break up with Deleuze and Guattari, though necessary, is (...) fraught with a whole series of difficulties that were already visible in A Thousand Plateaus's own relation to its outside. (shrink)

Are psychiatric disorders natural kinds? This question has received a lot of attention within present-day philosophy of psychiatry, where many authors debate the ontology and nature of mental disorders. Similarly, historians of psychiatry, dating back to Foucault, have debated whether psychiatric researchers conceived of mental disorders as natural kinds or not. However, historians of psychiatry have paid little to no attention to the influence of (a) theories within logic, and (b) theories within metaphysics on psychiatric accounts of proper method, and (...) on accounts of the nature and classification of mental disorders. Historically, however, logic and metaphysics have extensively shaped methods and interpretations of classifications in the natural sciences. This paper corrects this lacuna in the history of psychiatry, and demonstrates that theories within logic and metaphysics, articulated by Christian Wolff (1679-1754), have significantly shaped the conception of medical method and (psychiatric) nosology of the influential nosologist Boissier De Sauvages (1706-1767). After treating Sauvages, I discuss the method of the influential nosologist William Cullen (1710-1790), and demonstrate the continuity between the classificatory methods of Sauvages and Cullen. I show that both Sauvages and Cullen were essentialists concerning medical diseases in general and psychiatric disorders in particular, contributing to the history of conceptions of the ontology and nature of mental disorders. (shrink)

The objective of this article is to explore the value of psychoanalysis in the early twenty-first century through reference to Freud, Lacan, and Stiegler’s work on computational madness. In the first section of the article I consider the original objectives of psychoanalysis through reference to what I call Freud’s ‘normalisation project’, before exploring the critique of this discourse concerned with the defence of oedipal law through a discussion of the post-modern ‘individualisation project’ set out by Deleuze and Guattari and others. (...) Tracking the development of ‘the individualisation project’ in history, I consider its connections with the cybernetic theories of Wiener and Shannon in the psycho-cyber-utopianism of the 1990s, before moving on to consider the other side of the psychoanalytic-cybernetic interaction through a discussion of Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle in the second section of the article. In reading Lacan’s seminar on Freudian drive in terms of the cybernetic repression of death, I set up the conclusion to the article which involves a discussion of Bernard Stiegler’s ‘survival project’ that relies on a recognition of the limit of death in order to produce human significance and oppose the madness of our contemporary computational reality. (shrink)

I focus on specific practices in twentieth- and twenty-first-century mathematics of articulating, barring, taming, and operating with what mathematicians widely call mathematical monsters. I describe how over centuries the quotidian procedures of the epitome of rational practice – mathematics – have produced beings outside the extant purified categories understood by theorems and proofs, despite, and sometimes as a consequence of, ever greater precision and rigor. However, mathematical monsters stand in a different relation to their makers than socio-economic and moral monsters (...) who are barred from the world. Indeed, we will see how mathematicians have made plural and productive accommodation with their monsters. Although some mathematicians have been persuaded by logicians to bar monsters from the temple of mathematics by simply forbidding the operations that engender beings against nature, most mathematicians have accommodated or simply cohabited with their monsters by extending axioms, definitions, theorems, and methods of proving theorems as a part of quotidianized practice. (shrink)

The normative status of Michel Foucault’s critical method of genealogy has been the topic of much debate in secondary scholarship. Against the criticisms forwarded by Nancy Fraser and Jürgen Haberm...

Historians and philosophers of science have furnished a wide array of theoretical-historiographical terms to emphasize the discontinuities among different systems of knowledge. Some of the most famous include Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm”, Michel Foucault’s “episteme”, and the notion of “styles of reasoning” more recently developed by Ian Hacking and Arnold Davidson. This paper takes up this theoretical-historiographical thread by assessing the values and limitations of the notion of “style” for the historical and philosophical study of science. Specifically, reflecting on various methodological (...) and theoretical concerns prompted by sexuality, translation, and East Asian studies, this paper argues that the heretofore ways in which historians and philosophers of science have used the notion of “style” are severely restricted in terms of its mere applicability to the intellectual history of Western science. The particular example of the translation of “homosexuality” into Chinese during the May Fourth era reveals that the notion of “style” has the potential of carrying a much more dynamic conceptual weight, as when used in “styles of argumentation”. The paper also engages briefly with the historiography of scientific “national styles” and ends with some concluding remarks on the limitations of “social histories from below” and the under appreciated importance of “epistemological histories of possibilities”. (shrink)

This article examines three key aetiological theories of autism (meta-representations, executive dysfunction and weak central coherence), which emerged within cognitive psychology in the latter half of the 1980s. Drawing upon Foucault’s notion of ‘forms of possible knowledge’, and in particular his concept of savoir or depth knowledge, two key claims are made. First, it is argued that a particular production of autism became available to questions of truth and falsity following a radical reconstruction of ‘the social’ in which human sociality (...) was taken both to exclusively concern interpersonal interaction and to be continuous with non-social cognition. Second, it is suggested that this reconstruction of the social has affected the contemporary cultural experience of autism, shifting attention towards previously unacknowledged cognitive aspects of the condition. The article concludes by situating these claims in relation to other historical accounts of the emergence of autism and ongoing debates surrounding changing articulations of social action in the psy disciplines. (shrink)

The work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze frequently gave rise to a practice of philosophy as a form of critical problematization. Critical problematization both resonates between their thought and is also generative for contemporary philosophy in their wake. To examine critical problematization in each, a shared theme of inquiry provides a useful focal point. Foucault and Deleuze each deployed critical problematization in the context of studies of sexuality, a site of excited contestation that remains as crucial for us today (...) as it was for them four decades ago. Foucault’s well-known History of Sexuality, Volume 1 and Deleuze’s little-discussed text Coldness and Cruelty thus provide us with exemplary instances of the critical problematization of sexuality. An examination of these two texts, and their broader resonance, illuminates the potential of Foucauldian genealogy and Deleuzian symptomatology as methods for critical problematization today. It is argued that they provide compelling alternatives to modern critical moods that would want to interpret sexuality through a series of oppositions. (shrink)

This special issue of History of the Humane Sciences intends to shed light on a series of psychopathological entities that do not target well defined conditions and experiences, but rather aim at delimiting zones of uncertainty that defy psychopathology’s order of things: mild diagnoses or subthreshold disorders, borderline conditions, culture bound syndromes, or ideas of dimensions and dimensionality. While these categories have come to play an increasingly central role in psychiatric and psychological thinking during the last 50 years, historians and (...) social scientists have had remarkably little to say about how they have been created, what they have been used for, and what kind of realities they have helped to shape. In this introductory article we propose the concept of ‘psychopathological fringes’ to refer to these categories that are located somewhere at the border of psychopathological classifications and refer to zones of conceptual underdetermination. The notion of fringes serves to highlight both the conceptually and the socially marginal nature of the conditions, personal identities, and worlds delimited by these categories. The fringes of psychopathology are zones of vagueness, of epistemic uncertainty, and moral ambiguity. This introduction proposes a first incursion in these zones. It suggests some of the reason why they might have had attracted little interest in the past and why they may be more salient recently. It follows some analytical clues that might help chart a way through it and proposes a map through the collection of articles included in this issue. (shrink)

In 1995, a Swedish pilot study of Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) was launched to investigate its therapeutic efficacy and cost-effectiveness as treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) in suicidal women. In the same year, a sweeping reform of psychiatric care commenced, dramatically reducing the number of beds by the end of the decade. The psychiatry reform was presented as an important factor prompting the need for a community-based treatment for Borderline patients. This article suggests that the introduction of DBT in (...) Sweden, and its relationship to the reform, can only be adequately explained with reference to the wider political shift occurring at the time, whereby the Swedish welfare state and its guiding ethos of egalitarianism were abandoned in favour of a neoliberal ‘choice revolution’. With the new liberalism, hard work and individual responsibility replaced the idea of a Swedish ‘people’s home’, a nationwide community and social support network. This language was reflected in DBT, which sought to teach patients the ‘skills’ necessary ‘to create a life worth living’. In this context, therapy was constituted as a form of ‘work’ that the patient had to undertake to improve. Moreover, DBT rejected the prevailing view of Borderline patients as ‘manipulative’ and ‘aggressive’, suggesting instead that they were ‘helpless’, ‘weak’ and unable to regulate their emotions. This new Borderline persona fit neatly into the new liberal discourse: she could be taught to become a rational and independent person able to cope in a society that valued individual responsibility over social support. (shrink)

Motivational enhancement of any kind can be conceived of either as a way to reduce the need for effort, or as a change in the subjective perception of effort. However, in both cases, effort is not all that matters. In the evaluation of praiseworthy conduct, the practical goals pursued by the subject, their dedication, and the discernment they exercise are equally important. I further argue that not only in terms of the general purpose, but also in terms of the means (...) employed for human enhancement, we cannot, in fact, establish significant differences between the traditional technology of the self and biomedical technologies for enhancing motivation. There are two key features they all share. The traditional techniques of the self also aim at the gradual reduction of effort through their steady practice, and they are all mental conditioning and self-conditioning techniques based on repetition and training. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue ‘Foucault Before the Collège de France’ surveys Foucault’s work in the first part of his career. While there is a familiar chronology to the books he published in the 1960s – from History of Madness to The Archaeology of Knowledge – the story can be developed in relation to his articles, his translations, his early publications and manuscripts, and his teaching. Looking at the programme of posthumous publication of many of his courses and unfinished (...) manuscripts, this introduction discusses key themes, and introduces the papers of the special issue which analyse these texts in detail. It concludes with some general thoughts about what these hitherto neglected or hidden sources tell us about the work of Foucault. Although it adds some cautions about their use, we believe the texts and lectures analysed in this issue and others from the period before the Collège de France add valuable insights into our understanding of Foucault’s intellectual development, his interests and plans, and his enduring influence on a variety of fields in the humanities and social sciences. (shrink)

This paper explores the intertwinement of ontology and history that happened after the idealist turn of Kantian transcendentalism, particularly in classic German idealism and later in American pragmatism. The paper focuses on the less remarked-upon consequence of this intertwinement, namely the possibility of a new reading of history based on changes in concepts and habitual mentality. The paper proposes a new take on historiography that vindicates Hegel’s insight but changes his approach to a pragmatist one, more apt to face historical (...) changes in a technical way and less easily twistable into ideological frameworks. The paper argues that the notion of habit, as phenomenologically and semiotically described by Peirce, is the fundamental cellule of the pragmatist take on the entanglement of history and ontology. The paper elaborates on the notion of habit, singling out a special form of it called “gesture” that can be a useful tool for reading the history of the human spirit without incorporating Hegel’s dialectic and Absolute. The paper compares the notion of gesture as it originated in the pragmatist tradition with the parallel use of the term in the early studies of Michel Foucault and argues that the notion of gesture is better equipped to tackle a theoretical reading of history. (shrink)