Biopolitics and medicalization of abnormal ones

Abstract

This paper approaches the thematic of the medicalization of sufferings and behavioral anomalies from an historical perspective. It analyzes the emergency of a new epistemological configuration of psychiatric knowledge that emerged in the second half of the 19th Century. Taking as starting point the studies on biopolitics of the population of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, the inquires of Georges Canguilhem about the diffuse borders between the normal and the pathological, and the course that Foucault dedicates to Les anormaux, this paper studies the sprouting of an extended psychiatry related to the non pathological dimension. The Annales d'hygiéne publique et de médecine legal and Annales Médico- Psicologiques, published in France between years 1857 and 1924, are analyzed with the goal of understanding the way by which it was constructed this medicine of the behaviors and those biopolitical strategies defended by the theoreticians of the degeneration.