Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975

Among the towering intellectual figures of the last half century, perhaps the most versatile is Michel Foucault, who wrote classic texts on sexuality, madness, prison, and medicine. From 1971 until his death in 1984, Foucault gave public lectures at the world-famous Collège de France. The lectures comprising Abnormal begin by examining the role of psychiatry in modern criminal justice, and its method of categorizing individuals who "resemble their crime before they commit it." Building on the themes of societal self-defense, Foucault shows how and why defining "abnormality" and "normality" were prerogatives of power in the nineteenth century, linking deformity, delinquency, and sexual deviancy.