Des Anormaux de Foucault aux handicapés : le médico-social comme médecine de l’incurable

• Main Author: Stéphane Zygart
• Format: Article
• Language: fra
• Published: Université de Lille 2014-05-01
• Series: Methodos
• Subjects: abnormality; disability; madness; medico-social; genealogy; meaning
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/methodos/4034

Foucault in his lessons of 1974-1975 at College de France makes the genealogy of a category which disapeared at the beginning of the 20th century, after a very short existence: the category of abnormals, linked with the theory of degeneration. This category gave an infinite extension to abnormalities, and was founded on the somatization of every diseases, those of the mind as those of the body. For theses reasons, it's possible to compare it with our notion of disability. Indeed, following the definition of WHO, disabilities are always caused by a physiological pathology, and are very numerous (the last classification of disabilities takes more than one hundred pages). These comparison between "diability" and "abnormality" is not an essay of heuristic. It is a way to understand what changed in our norms and our use of them. The social integration and the modification of the people we consider abnormals is now the general pattern of our norms, and not anymore the exclusion. But abnormals as disabled people still cause our anxiety, and we still try to put an end to abnormalities by establishing a global security for everybody - disabled people and normal people - in a endless quest. So, the genalogic method reveals the splits of our notion of disability, and how our will to take medically care of the incurable people is, at the same time, the origin of our medico-social institutions and the expression of very sharp problems related to difference and differenciation.