Jean Khalfa – författare

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l''âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.

This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.

History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?

Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.

The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l''âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.

This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.

History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?

Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hôpital Général in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.

The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.

Ce livre propose une réflexion autour de l’influence de la pensée de Frantz Fanon dans les arts et la littérature des Amériques. Il réunit des contributions portant sur des expressions artistiques variées (roman, musique, cinéma, théâtre) et évoque l’oeuvre d’artistes de différents horizons culturels et linguistiques (Antigua-et-Barbuda, Argentine, Bolivie, Brésil, Canada, Chili, Cuba, États-Unis, Guadeloupe, Haïti, Porto Rico, République Dominicaine). Les textes montrent non seulement l’actualité de la pensée de Fanon et sa capacité de résonance dans des territoires extrêmement divers, mais aussi les déplacements, les décalages, les prolongements par lesquels elle se renouvelle sans cesse sur ce continent traversé, encore aujourd’hui, par les questions (néo)coloniales. Le volume met ainsi en évidence la façon dont Fanon est (re)présenté dans les productions artistiques et littéraires, en même temps qu’il rend compte de la manière dont des artistes peuvent être influencés par sa pensée sans le citer, parfois même sans l’avoir lu, faisant émerger la notion d’un inconscient fanonien à l’oeuvre sous des formes esthétiques.