ABSTRACT
The thesis that the truncated version of Histoire de la folie represented by Madness and Civilization imposed a simplified version of Michel Foucault’s thought upon English-language readers appears to me to be very much to the point. Colin Gordon’s remarkable article demonstrates this quite clearly, and I am in total agreement with him. This interpretation does not, however, rule out the possibility that another reason may also account for the different ways Foucault’s work was read: the historical gap between the intellectual context of the beginning of the 1960s, at the time when Histoire de la folie was published, and that of the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when Foucault’s book began to reach another audience and to assume a political/practical meaning rather than a theoretical one. Colin Gordon himself raises this possibility at the beginning of his article. But I would like to insist upon its importance and show how, even in France -where the same text has circulated since the beginning of the 1960s – the book has been the subject of two very contrasted readings. My contribution will not therefore be a direct commentary on Colin Gordon’s article (with which I am in overall agreement). Instead, by illuminating the French side of things, it may help English-language readers to understand some of the elements of a situation, in France, in which Histoire de la folie was the catalyst.
