Michel Foucault and Alain Badiou Discuss “Philosophy and Psychology”

Even as he used Freudian concepts, he declared Freudian psychoanalysis complicit in what he called “disciplinary society,” another method, like prisons, schools, and hospitals, of keeping masses of people under constant surveillance and in states of submission. It is this post-68 Foucault many of us came to know—an anti-philosopher whose deep distrust of all institutional forms of power seemed the perfect ally for post-adolescent college students in comfortable rebellion. This is why it is a little surprising to see the Foucault above, in a 1965 conversation with philosopher Alain Badiou, ensconced in the bourgeois world of a French philosophical culture, with its lineages and ordinary citizens browsing paperback copies of Marx and Hegel, instead of staging Situationist actions to disrupt the social order.

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