Description: Three years before his death Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that have remained relatively unknown until only recently. Entitled "Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, " these lectures provides the missing link between Foucault s early work on sexuality and punishment and his later work on Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the 20th century, Foucault traces how the early ethical acts of truth-telling in ancient Greece gradually metamorphosed into acts of self-incrimination in monastic times and ultimately into the birth and rise of psychiatry as the foundation of modern penology, criminology, and criminal justice. For Foucault, self-incrimination no longer did the work necessary to quell justice because, by the 19th century, we wanted to know more than just the fact of wrongdoing, we wanted to know who the criminal was: not just whether the accused committed the crime, but what it was about him that made him commit the crime. An avowal of wrong-doing was no longer sufficient psychiatric expertise was now necessary and that development marks the birth of discipline and modern criminal justice made so famous by Foucault"
Brief description:
Bernard E. Harcourt is Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law at Columbia Law School and the director of the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought.
Review Quotes: "The Louvain lectures show us an aspect of Foucault's work that is often neglected in an attempt to focus on his commitment to historicizing: that for histories, even genealogical histories, to be constructed, one must not only trace the changes themselves but also that which is changed and therefore remains, in its changes, continuous."-- "Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"