Andrew Scull’s “fair and balanced” review of the new translation of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness has been making the rounds. Those who find fair and balanced reviews to be little more than displays of pettiness and resentiment may want to look at Colin Gordon’s review, which, it seems, has been read by next to no one.
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This is the personal website of Craig McFarlane, a doctoral candidate in the Graduate Programme in Sociology at York University, Toronto and a lecturer in the Department of Law at Carleton University, Ottawa. I also contribute to The Inhumanities.
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4 Comments
Thanks Craig! The review by Gordon is good enough to merit immediate rereading tomorrow morning.
Forwarded the link on to my wife who just tonight finished reading her paper for an academic conference in Chicago. I think she’s up to what Gordon calls for in the final paragraph, though a central thesis of the paper is that The History of Madness does have to be reread after History of Sexuality vol. 1′s new turn in terms of power analysis. Madness’s critique wasn’t or hasn’t been silenced in the age of reason, but was reconstituted within in changing structures of power, power that is sometimes exercised from below – so she argues by way of attention to the inmate journal published at Utica’s asylum in the 1840′s and 50′s.
Scull finally signals his real plaint in the final paragraph – how dare he attack reason so cynically! Scull’s own work in the field takes up the neo-whiggish ‘social control’ thesis to explain why things went bad in asylums.
It was pointed on the Foucault e-mail list that Scull’s criticisms ultimately fail: even if Foucault “abused” his sources or brought an excessively “textualist” orientation to the history of madness, Scull fails to demonstrate that these “errors” ultimately work against Foucault’s point. Scull’s review read as rather petty.
Petty is precisely the word I used when forwarding the link to J. I mean, criticizing the first part, written c. 1960, for only using one post wwII source is not a little like fulminating today over a long, groundbreaking article on Protestant Pietism referring to just one piece since the fall of the berlin wall.
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