La Réception nord-américaine de Folie et déraison de Foucault

Abstract

This article aims at understanding the North-American reception of Foucault’s Folie et déraison. After showing how American concep-tions of social control facilitated the integration of Foucauldian thinking in North-American academia, I examine the ways by which the advocates of anti-psychiatry and the historians of psychiatry read Folie et déraison, which became emblematic for French Theory. I then present various Anglo-American critiques of Folie et déraison and defend the persistence of a “Foucauldian spirit” against the sci-entifization of psychiatry. All this allows for an assessment of the leg-acy of Folie et déraison in the North American debates.