Revisiting Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason sixty years after its publication.

Abstract

With the objective of celebrating the more than sixty years since its publication, the present text takes up points of Michel Foucault’s first great work –Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason– which he presented as a doctoral thesis in 1961. The article is divided in three parts. The first one –an introduction– deals briefly with historical aspects surrounding the work. The second part makes some indications about the language of madness and the necessity of its inclusion in institutional processes. The final section speaks about the literature of madness, or about madness and its