ABSTRACT
A second way in which one might explore the relation between madness and modernity is in relation to the emergence of the
bio-political state. Michel Foucault’s (1965) Histoire de la folie (translated as Madness and Civilization) provided a paradigm for looking at the shift in epistmé in which madness lost its organic relation to society and became the subject of various legislative and administrative measures geared towards the technique of exclusion and consignment of the mad into specialized spaces that removed them from normal spaces. As is well known, Foucault later expressed his dissatisfaction with the approach he had taken since it emphasized the repressive powers of the state rather than the productive powers he later came to associate with bio-power. Nevertheless the relation between law as an expression of sovereign power and discipline as an expression of bio-power remained crucial to his imagination of the bio-political state and despite claims made by some scholars that Foucault thought of modernity as that under which disciplinary power replaced sovereign power, the publication of his lectures at the College de France makes it very clear that this is a misreading of his oeuvre.1
