Élisabeth Roudinesco

"Roudinesco provides a finely drawn map of the intellectual debates within French psychoanalysis, especially under the influence of the German emigres during the 1930s and 1940s. She is a good historian, in that she provides not only a narrative history but also extensive passages from Lacan's own oral-history interviews with the various figures, so that we have not only her commentary but some flavor of the original documentation. Many of the quotes are gems."--Sander I. Gilman, Bulletin of the History of Medicine.

Michael Foucault's intellectual journeys carried him across many different disciplines and often into uncharted lands. His astonishing discoveries and claims have been received with both unbridled enthusiasm and vehement dissent. This collection of essays is the first to bring together major criticisms of Foucault by other writers with their own visions. From the perspective of philosophy, the history of science, intellectual history, sociology, political science, and literary criticism, the distinguished contributors to this book discuss forthrightly and fairly the difficulties and dangers of Foucault's explorations. Whether they attack or defend him, his texts are closely examined and carefully interpreted.

Where does perversion begin? Who is perverse? Ever since the word first appeared in the Middle Ages, anyone who delights in evil and in the destruction of the self or others has been described as ‘perverse’. But while the experience of perversion is universal, every era has seen it and dealt with it in its own way. The history of perversion in the West is told here through a study of great emblematic figures of the perverse – Gilles de Rais, the mystical saints and the flagellants in the middle ages, the Marquis de Sade in the eighteenth century, the masturbating child, the male homosexual and the hysterical woman nineteenth century, Nazism in the twentieth century, and the complementary figures of the paedophile and the terrorist in the twenty-first. The perverse are rarely talked about and when they are it is usually only to be condemned. They are commonly viewed as monstrous and cruel, as something alien to the very nature of being human. And yet, perversion can also attest to creativity and self-transcendence, to the refusal of individuals to submit to the rules and prohibitions that govern human life. Perversion fascinates us precisely because it can be both abject and sublime. Whether they are sublime because they turn to art or mysticism, or abject because they surrender to their murderous impulses, the perverse are part of us because they exhibit something that we always conceal: our own negativity and our dark side. —From the Inside Flap