1974 CdF Psychiatric Pwr, Ch. 9, pp. 201-223

Questions and points to discus:

1. When Foucault talks about how the idiot has no past, can we read this colonially? Linked to a question of education and assimilation

2. Notion of the will? Relation of idiot and will – its relation to Kantian morality? (p. 215)

3. Idea of psychiatric power as tautological? (p. 218-19)

Discussion: 

A kind of confrontation of wills between patient and doctor

- Discussion of Seguin:

- Will as ordering of instincts

- Kant identifies skepticism as anarchism and dogmatism as totalizing 

- A movement contrary to Kant – a will not to be organized/subsumed

- A will refusing to assemble itself as autonomous 

- Psychiatric power emerged because of children – to understand them, not children

- Madness for adults; idiocy for children

- The figures Foucault cites are interested in the movement from childhood to adulthood

- Difficulty of distinguishing between Foucault’s voice and the voice of those he cites 

- Draw out the power dynamic through a comparative of the psychiatrist and the teacher

- Surplus power (p. 216)

- The body as a site of power/surplus

- Relates to two weeks ago and the body and surplus of power “Punitive Society” 

- Extractive/creation of docility to manage surplus (to return in discussion of D&P)

- Not yet about education/what we would refer to as that; the problem that needs to be solved is how to make sure that parents could be freed from care work; we don’t get contrasts between different kinds of education

- Insititution of certain classes of children and the function of education as geared towards moral treatment (akin to the asylum)

- Prison/school/asylum as institutions of moral treatment 

- The goal is not to create autonomous people, it seems more to be securing yes to authority; development of obedience to external authority 

- Double movement between school and psychiatric power

- 218-219 relation of the school and the asylum 

- repetition of the phrase “supplement of power” 

- Moral treatment as norming 

- What accounts Foucault goes to (first-person accounts, reports, etc.) 

- The possible link between Foucault and Piaget and the question of development/assuming a paradigm in the process of normalization and psychoanalysis (topics at beginning and end of lecture) 

- Fear of what the “will to not will” represents