ABSTRACT
Madness becomes the name for a condition which expresses a basic, not to say cosmic, lack, while mental illness is the term used to describe how society conceives of, and controls, madness. In 1961, seven years after his first book, and after a great deal of difficulty in finding a publisher, the intended first volume of a long history of madness appeared under the title Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique. The historico-ontological gap is still apparent, however, in the disjunction between madness as a “call to and abandonment of” the world and its “significations,” that is, the signs by which it is recognized in history. Thus Foucault’s history of madness is again a history both of the way madness is defined and produced within society and of madness itself as an “experience” which precedes its “significations.”.
