“We need a history of that other trick…” (Foucault, History of Madness, xxvii)

“But the idea [of writing a new preface] I find rather unattractive.” (xxvii)

Above are excerpts from the beginning of the 1961 and 1972 prefaces to Michel Foucault’s History of Madness. The tone of these two lines, across a temporal gap of 11 years, falls from a prophetic urgency of “we need” to a questioning of the author himself. What is the significance of this difference in his rhetorical strategy?

Foucault, in his 1979 interview with Lucette Finas, said that he had never written anything other than fictions (qtd. in Royall). Applying his fictional method of writing to the styles of the two prefaces, I find that the 1961 preface is similar to a heroic tragedy, where Foucault constructs a shared experience with readers, leading them to recapture the “degree zero of the history of madness” (History of Madness xxvii). He is an advocate that demands his readers to join his quest of listening to the murmurs of madness. In contrast, the 1972 preface resembles the style of a sarcastic comedy, where Foucault ridicules the act of writing and constantly dismisses his own authorship. His 1961 text shows that, despite his doubts of subjectivity, Foucault still emphasizes a shared agency with his readers to uncover the limit-experience of madness excluded by history. However, his 1972 text exposes the absurdity of subjectivity entirely. He went from problematizing the subjectivity in the history of madness to subjectivity in all utterances, building toward Foucault’s central argument of the indispensable relationship between power and knowledge. Therefore, I argue that Foucault’s deepening and broadening questioning of subjectivity led to this shift in style. 

In the 1961 preface, Foucault shapes his voice as a prophet in a heroic tragedy to construct a unique intersubjectivity with his readers and the entire humanity so that there is an urgency to join his quest of uncovering the limit-experience of madness. Intersubjectivity, as existentialist Maurice Merleau-Ponty states, is a “transcendental subjectivity” (378) that emphasizes the shared experience of all human beings as inherent and fundamental rather than constructed through reason or abstraction. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the “sense and intention” of human beings (364), looking for how to find the organization of human experience. Although Foucault’s subjectivity is not stable and straightforward as Merleau-Ponty’s, I believe that Foucault still adopts the method of intersubjectivity to deliver the message of his book, rendering it a call for uniting different readers to “save” humanity from the lost experience of madness. He similarly highlights the importance of human experience excluded by the rationality of historical analysis.

The tragic style of this text makes readers feel that they are connected with Foucault and the submerged experience of madness, shouldering the responsibility to uncover what is excluded by history. Tragedy, as Aristotle writes in Poetics, is an event that is “serious” and of “magnitude” (1449, line 16), elicits “pity and fear” (1452, line 3), and is the “fall” of a good fortune into a bad one (1451, line 14). Foucault depicts that tragic “fall” of the historical conception of madness through a melancholic tone, symbolism, and anthropomorphism, intricately woven together in one another, evoking an urgency and empathy in readers. In the very first paragraph, he calls out that madness had been situated in “a reign of truth” (Foucault History of Madness xxvii), using the aggressive symbolism of “reign” to accentuate the harm of taking written, historical “facts” as truth. To an average reader, the use of “reign” serves as a hyperbole: truth as a “reign” is an exaggeration to an audience who are accustomed to reading history and science in the Western tradition. It heightens their desire to join Foucault in problematizing the violence of history. An anthropomorphic metaphor follows: “before it was brought back to life by the lyricism of protestation”. Protestation refers to truth telling in daily conversations, specifically, a truth telling that is emphatic and declarative (“Protestation, N.”). He juxtaposes this solemn term with the idleness of “lyricism”, exposing the ridiculousness in pursuing a truth in the experience of madness that cannot be defined through negation and fragmentation. Foucault also mixes in the anthropomorphic verb “brought back” here, provoking readers’ detest against the current history of madness is an artificial and institutional tale that disciplines people. These lyrical, extended sentences build up throughout the preface to transform readers’ subjective experience of history, showing them how it is a “history of limits” (xxix): “those obscure gestures”, “this hollowed-out void”, “this white space” (xxix). By forming three symbols into a parallelism from distant figures to concrete void, Foucault heightens the “fall” of history and intensifies readers’ sense of human emotions, subjective experiences. Thus, he starts creating an affective relationship with his readers, engaging them to feel how the science of history isolates their experience, excludes them as persons, meanwhile stretching the potential in recognizing their own subjectivity. Phrases like “degree zero of history” (xxvii) and “then, and only then” (xxviii) again highlight the solemnity of this quest for the other trick of madness that readers must collectively join with Foucault. Finally, Foucault proposes that one must “question it at the confines of history about a tear that is something like the very birth of history” (xxix). Instead of explicating what he is pursuing in this book, Foucault uses the symbolism of “tear”, which has the connotation of sentimentality and regret, shaping the melancholic and serious tone of the entire preface. It gives readers the urgency of engagement as if their subjectivity, together with that of Foucault’s, can communicate with “that other trick that madness plays” (xxvii), with the murmurings in the history of madness. 

However, Foucault does not simply build on intersubjectivity. In fact, he evokes intersubjectivity only to create an illusion of the possibility of a united human experience, signalling the elusiveness of madness he is chasing after in his project. The majesty of the beginning of his 1961 preface forms a content-wise chiasmus with its ending. He first achieves this “twist” of intersubjectivity through the distorted use of subjects: readers cannot find a stable pronoun in Foucault’s writing, making them question the existence of a concrete subjectivity in the history of madness. The self is omnipresent and diffused because Foucault uses the unstable formal subject “it”. The French original version starts with “il faut…” (Foucault Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la Folie à l’âge Classique 187), which means “it’s necessary”. The mis-translation in English of “we need” in fact sheds light on Foucault’s rhetorical choice: pulling readers into his quest of madness, but also provoking them to question their role in this quest, eventually alluding to the lack of an agent in the history of madness. Foucault also heightens the instability of subjectivity with modal verbs, such as writing “it is that ‘less than’ that we must investigate” (xxxi). Modal verbs strip the writer from the need to consider verbal tenses; instead, every act is permanently present, permanently a possibility. Therefore, readers are brought into the exigence to investigate the things that are deemed to be less than history, regardless of when they are reading the book, forming a mockery against the emphasis on linearity and time in historical studies. They are also brought into questioning whether one’s experience can be shared through intersubjectivity across such an expansive temporality.

Foucault carefully chooses the images of his words to problematize subjectivity in the study of history. His history of madness seeks to uncover the “obscure figures” (xxix) and the “murmurings” (xxxi), experiences that are not necessarily connected with those of others and do not have a definite subject. The events that Foucault is interested in are scattered in the archives, “the caesura that establishes the distance between reason and non-reason is the origin” (xxviii). That’s why in this text, there is no need for a concrete, personal pronoun; a lack of pronoun highlights the violence of a truth-history and inexhaustibility of this project. Similarly, he admits that this project is “inevitably a slightly solitary one” (xxxv), as although he sometimes has recourse to materials compiled by other authors, he ultimately wants to present the archives themselves rather than framing them in a specific subjectivity (xxxiv). 

The consecutive rhetorical questions in the essay also point out the intricacy of Foucault’s concern with subjectivity. He creates a shared, tragic experience to engage his readers in a collective quest of limit-experience that is beyond the truth and abstraction of history, but he also wants to explore the experience of madness that is unstable and unidentifiable:

“But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance? Towards what region might it take us, which was neither the history of knowledge nor history plain and simple, which was commanded neither by the teleology of the truth nor the rational concatenation of causes, which only have value or meaning beyond the division?” (xxix)

The destabilizing, excluded subject that Foucault sets off to explore leaves a mysterious aura for his “followers” through the rhetorical questions. I think that Foucault poses these questions not to answer them, but to trap his readers in the wondering, to question together the unstable and diffused subjectivity in his project. He summarizes this “trick” of intersubjectivity neatly with a loose chiasmus: “The great oeuvre of the history of the world is indelibly accompanied by the absence of an oeuvre” (xxxi). 

Although Foucault is not an existentialist, I think that in the rhetorical strategies of his 1961 preface to History of Madness, he grapples with the potential of intersubjectivity in his studies, paving the way for his questioning of subjectivity. Similar to Merleau-Ponty’s argument for intersubjectivity, he emphasizes the importance of crude experience in history that is not rationalized by abstract truth or reason. His tragic, prophetic tone creates a sense of intersubjectivity between him and his readers to illustrate the exigence of his project, but he also stretches the existentialist notion of intersubjectivity by eventually highlighting the elusiveness and restriction of subjectivity in the history of madness: there is no single, “crude” experience that can be found. He brings the readers into a shared subjectivity, and then breaks it. 

In a stark contrast to the elusive, winding, and majestic sentences that evoke a sense of intersubjectivity in the 1961 preface, the 1972 preface consists of a lot more shorter sentences with a stable first-person pronoun and frequent self-denials, almost laughing at the idea of subjectivity. This signals not only the intensification of Foucault’s deepening questioning of subjectivity, but also the broadening scope of his questioning: Foucault ridicules subjectivity in the foundational medium of writing itself, beyond just the description of history. These choices deliver a flippant tone, representing that of a comedy. This version starts with a clear “I” rather than an ambiguous “we” or “it is”, restricting the affordance of this text from a universal audience to Foucault himself, which means that readers perhaps do not feel as engaged with the voice in this text, but set themselves apart from the author. Foucault proceeds to juxtapose potential opposition to every claim of his: “I really ought to write a new preface … But the idea I find rather unattractive” (xxxvii). He then uses second-person pronouns to directly address readers, engaging them into criticizing the subjectivity in a preface: “you must bend your reading, your analyses, your criticisms to what I was trying to do, and take note of my modesty” (xxxviii). In this way, he overturns subjectivity by pointing out that the choice of agency in philosophy is illusory; readers are in fact turned into subjects by what they read rather than holding subjectivity in their own hands. 

In addition to a reversal of sentence structures and pronouns as opposed to the 1961 preface, the 1972 preface also reverses the connotation of images and metaphors to dismantle subjectivity. An interesting parallel he drew with his 1961 preface is the word choice of “monarchy” (xxxviii). This time, instead of comparing the truth of history to a “reign”, Foucault compares his own writing to “a declaration of tyranny” (xxxviii); instead of highlighting the “caesura” in history, Foucault suggests that the act of writing is itself a “simulacra” (xxxvii), which is “a representation of some deity, person, or thing” (“Simulacra, N.”). He does not just question subjectivity in studying history, but questions even the subjectivity of the author.

One might think that Foucault is in fact heightening the presence of a stable subjectivity here as he writes an entire paragraph on how he thinks a book should be (xxxviii). This paragraph repeats a first-person pronoun three times: “my desire…” The verb “should” also threads throughout the paragraph, imposing Foucault’s subjective ideal of books upon his readers. He even proceeds to use a more omnipresent first-person plural pronoun “we”: “We should not try to justify the old book… we should not pretend to discover in it a secret reserve or a richness that initially escaped detection” (xxxviii-xxxix). However, it is worthy to note that “should” is also a conditional often used in a subjunctive mood that describes events impossible to realistically take place. Therefore, with the double-edged meaning of “should”, Foucault exposes the impotency of a subjective desire, ridiculing the centrality of a subject in scholarly conversations.

The most satirical and comedic part of this preface is perhaps the final paragraph, where Foucault imagines a criticism by Jacques Derrida:

“‘But you have just written a preface.’

‘At least it’s short.’” (xxxix)

This paragraph exposes the game of subjectivity: it is deeply rooted in language, communication, and philosophical inquiries. Even Foucault, arguing against the stability of subjectivity, cannot escape from the constraints of it. Yet, this satirical, comedic revelation is exactly where Foucault ditches subjectivity: despite his previous discussions on his ideals of what philosophical inquiries should look like, this ideal is ultimately his own opinion that, although should not dominate over his readers or become part of their shared experience, will inevitably influence his readers’ opinions. At this point in the text, it is clear that Foucault not only expands and destabilizes subjectivity, he does not seek to engage himself in the discussion on subjectivity anymore.

 Foucault’s rhetoric is engaging more with the games and rules of writing rather than a specific subject of writing. As Foucault writes in his 1977 text “Lives of Infamous Men”, “A mood-based and purely subjective book?  I would say rather – but it may come to the same thing – that it’s a rule-based and game-based book” (159). Foucault exposes the game of subjectivity not to dialectically argue against it, but to show how it has been so wrongfully established in the traditions of philosophy and writing. 

One might disagree by saying that Foucault never engaged with subjectivity to begin with. However, I do not think that Foucault is completely alien to the topic of subjectivity, especially with the ongoing philosophical discussions in existentialism around the time when he wrote the 1961 preface. His voice as a prophet joined by his readers as followers illustrates his concern with the subjective experience of madness, although the subjectivity might not be as concrete, defined. It also reflects his challenging of a history that is rational, pointing out the hypocrisy of objectivity.  

To conclude, through analyzing the rhetorical strategies and genres of the two different prefaces, I have illustrated how Foucault’s increasing questioning of subjectivity causes the change in his writing styles. From 1961 to 1972, I believe that he not only doubts and expands the fixed stability of subjective experience, but also completely collapses the idea through recognizing the inevitable, deeply-rooted co-option of subjectivity in all forms of inquiries and communications. Moreover, this analysis responds to a common misinterpretation of Foucault’s discussion on power and knowledge. Although power sounds like an object that one agent can exert upon another, the subject-object relation in Foucault’s writing is in fact not as stable and unilateral. Power and knowledge are entangled and diffused in one’s social, political, and intellectual life. Even as Foucault writes about questioning subjectivity in his 1971 preface, he is still involved in the production of subjectivity that sways his readers. I believe this more and more omnipresent sense questioning of subjectivity illustrates that Foucault is not only a historian or an advocate seeking the limit-experience of madness in archives, but pokes fun at the way of thinking in Western philosophical inquiries, or the modern life in general, that has been taken for granted. This change in style prompts continuing questions in academic research and political conversations today. For example, why do most U.S. universities follow similarly chronological and European-centered texts in philosophy classes (Kidd)? Why do the media point to a single person of the current U.S. president as the origin of power (Savage)? Understanding the implicit but blind trust in the subjectivity of language in these discourses might help disintegrate the repetitive cycles of polemics, the facade of free political engagement in the current society. As how Foucault claims his writings to be “fictions”, many of these debates are also fictional as they fail to recognize the elusiveness of subjectivity under entangled influences of power and knowledge.

Works Cited

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Foucault, Michel. “Preface to the 1961 Edition”, History of Madness, edited by Jean Khalfa, 

translated by Jonathan Murphy, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2006, pp. xxvii-xxxvi.

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https://philosophersmag.com/reloading-the-canon/. Accessed 30 Apr. 2025.

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https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6726129706. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.

Royall, Paul. “Foucault’s Fictions.” Philosophy Now, Issue 6, 1993. 

https://philosophynow.org/issues/6/Foucaults_Fictions#:~:text=%E2%80%9CI%20have%20not%20attempted%20to,%3A%20Power%2C%20Truth%20Strategy%20ed. Accessed 17 Apr. 2025.

Savage, Charlie. “Trump’s Maximalist Assertion of Presidential Power Takes the Rule of 

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https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3799769899. Accessed 26 Apr. 2025.