Michel Foucoult’s work has profondly affected the teaching of such diverse disciplines as literacy criticism, criminology, and gender studies. Arguing that definitions of abnormal behavior are culturally constructed, Foucloudt explores the unfair divisions between those who meet and those who deviate from social norms.
Foucoult’s deeply visual sense or scenes such as ritual public exocutions, lends itself well to Moshe Susser’s dramatic illustrations.
The Frist two chapters and part of the third chapter were translated by Tom Bottonmore and remainder by David Frisby. I would like to thank Glyn Adey for supplying me with a draft translation of some sections of the present volume. Our greatest debt must be to the late keathe Mengelberg who originally provided a draft of the whole volume. Without the assistance of this earlier work, it is doubful whether the present translation could have been complated. This translation is therefore dedicated to her memory.
The “essays and lecture” brought together in this volume scrupulousy respect Ricoeur’s original text in conformity with the policy of the editorial commitee of the Font Ricoeur, the Ricoeur Archive. Any Modifications that have been introduced have to do only with changes in punctuation, or typograpical errors, or evident mistakes that may exist in the manuscripts or the already published versions; the most important of these are indicated by brakets. Other modifications have been made to quoted passages and references (which are often imprecise or incomplete). But we have not thought it necessary to indocate all of these; only the most significant of them are followed by the indication “Editors’ note.”
Hitherto men have constantly made up for themselves false conceptions about themselves, about what they are and what they ought to be. They have arranged their relationships according to their ideas of God, of normal man, etc. The phantoms of their brains have got out of their hands. They, the creators, have bowed down before their creations. Let us liberate them from the chimeras, the ideas, dogmas, imaginary beings under the yoke of which they are pining away. Let us revolt against the rule of thoughts. Let us teach men, says one, to exchange these imaginations for thoughts which correspond to the essence of man; says the second, to take up a critical attitude to them; says the third, to knock them out of their heads; and — existing reality will collapse. These innocent and childlike fancies are the kernel of the modern Young-Hegelian philosophy, which not only is received by the German public with horror and awe, but is announced by our philosophic heroes with the solemn consciousness of its cataclysmic dangerousness and criminal ruthlessness. The first volume of the present publication has the aim of uncloaking these sheep, who take themselves and are taken for wolves; of showing how their bleating merely imitates in a philosophic form the conceptions of the German middle class; how the boasting of these philosophic commentators only mirrors the wretchedness of the real conditions in Germany. It is its aim to debunk and discredit the philosophic struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy and muddled German nation.
