ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault opens his 1977 text, "The Lives of Infamous Men", by writing, this is not a book of history. "The Lives of Infamous Men" introduces an "anthology of existences" strangled by confinement. Foucault opens "About the Concept of the 'Dangerous Individual' in Nineteenth-Century Legal Psychiatry" with a description of a 1975 case of a serial rapist who, having admitted to his crimes, remains persistently silent while a judge questions him about his motives and impulses. Foucault observes that there has been a collapsing of separate worlds of discourse, of the juridico-legal with the Christian tradition of confession and its heirs—psychological discourses of self-disclosure. Foucault's most sustained consideration of a monomania diagnosis concerns the case of Pierre Riviere. Foucault and the other seminarists do interpret Riviere's memoir; indeed, they interpret the memoir heavy-handedly, arguing that Riviere's murder and memoir were undertaken for entirely different reasons than their author claimed.
