THE STRENGTH OF MADNESS

REGIMES OF KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICES

Abstract

This text aims to present a horizontal reading of some regimes of knowledge and certain practices present in the discursiveness of the seminal work “History of madness in the classical age”, by Michel Foucault. Therefore, describe madness from the regency prisms of empiricist, rationalist and positivist knowledge that structure the modulations of understanding madness as an object of knowledge according to which its own history traces different paradigms of approaches and, consequently, capable distinct discursive propositions of managing knowledge regimes and practices. The method used here is derived inversely from Foucault's archeology, for which knowledge is only possible to be interpreted from its multiple discursive manifestations within the social circuit in which it finds itself in circulation.