ABSTRACT
In this article, I contend that Franco Basaglia’s work of reform in psychiatry can be read as a proposal for an affirmative biopolitical psychiatry. My claim is that Basaglia’s reform is to be regarded not only as a successful dismantling of the old disciplinary psychiatry, which was based on a purely organic treatment of mental illness and confined within the closed space of the asylum, but also as an ante litteram attempt at preventing what Pierangelo Di Vittorio refers to as a “biopolitical psychiatry”: by the latter he means a psychiatry that makes extensive use of psychopharmacology, psychiatrises all forms of psychological suffering, reduces the human psyche to its organic correlative – for instance, by focusing exclusively on neuroscientific research. Di Vittorio’s definition is notably limited, for he seems to overlook Foucault’s conceptual oscillations between affirmative biopolitics and negative biopower. As Roberto Esposito has argued, while affirmative biopolitics enhances, promotes and fosters life, biopower amounts to its negative drift, its intrinsic risk of becoming a thanatopolitics which ultimately disallows life through the very means used to foster it. Di Vittorio’s biopolitical psychiatry does not bear any affirmative connotation, and his radically negative perspective should rather be considered as the exertion of biopower in psychiatry, as a negative involution of an affirmative biopolitical psychiatry, which is largely yet to be theorised.
