La Folie Research Group
History of Madness National Council for Scientific and Technological Development - CNPq
Presentation:
The La Folie Research Group provokes and builds theoretical reflection, crossing different fields of knowledge and the arts, on the structural bipartition of society and its spaces, territories, institutions and rights between the side of rational and productive subjects and, as such , morally good; and the side of unproductive, crazy, crazy, criminal subjects, and, as such, morally bad.
This social division begins to be systematically and structurally organized within society and by public authorities in the 17th century, extending to our days. Michel Foucault, who offers us one of our most fundamental theoretical references, called this system of structural but also anatomical discrimination of subjects, which goes deeper into the control of their bodies, 'disciplinary society' and its surveillance 'panopticism'.
Ultimately, this social division is also linked to the analysis of races, those that must live and those that can or must die, and is genealogically linked to the analysis of class.
Performance:
The research of this group aims to broaden and deepen the historiographical narrative of madness in the inheritance and continuity of Michel Foucault's fundamental work, Histoire de la folie, of the other works of this author and of those that, especially in the work of Robert Castel, constitute themselves in this very same discursive field.
The privileged archives of this research are:
psychiatric and psychopathological publications;
the archives of sanatoriums, hospitals and educational institutions;
the literary works; musicography and cinematography;
the anti-psychiatric and anti-asylum movements in the broad sense;
the resistance movements of patients;
countercultural movements.
In the range of fields of action, the La Folie Research Group is developing several activities: