Clare O’Farrell, Foucault, Radio Interview 1: The phenomenon of madness, Refracted Input blog, 18 February 2025
Citation from Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie a l’âge classique. Entretien de Michel Foucault avec Nicole Brice. Diffusion le 31 mai 1961 sur France III National. In Michel Foucault, Entretiens radiophoniques, 1961-1983, Flammarion / VRIN / INA, 2024, pp. 13-16.
“It seemed to me that madness was a somewhat variable phenomenon in civilisation, It fluctuated just as much as any other cultural phenomenon. Basically, when reading American books about how some primitive civilisations reacted to the phenomenon of madness, I wondered whether it might be interesting to look at the way in which our own culture reacted to this phenomenon. […] There are civilisations which celebrated the mad, others that kept them separate, others that cared for them. But what I really wanted to emphasise was that caring for the mad was not the only possible reaction to the phenomenon of madness.” (p. 13)
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