Abstract

This article examines the contribution that Michel Foucault as genealogist provided to the comprehension of drug as ‘intensifier agent of reality’ in some of his works of the early 70s, when the main theme of Madness and Civilization was resumed and partially modified, and in some lessons at the Collège de France on Psychiatric Power. Drug is matched by Foucault with the aim of answering to crucial questions posed by the 19th Century psychiatric power: what is madness? what kind of truth does madness contain? how can we distinguish real madness from fake or simulated madness? Peculiar to Foucault’s sagittal view is to show how deep those epistemological and legal questions have been answered by the psychiatric power both from the outside – observing the insane and his symptoms, subjecting him to interrogation or to hypnosis – and from the inside, thanks to the personal experience of the psychiatrist who used to take drugs. This way the 19th Century, that is the long century of asylum psychiatry, directs its ‘experimental’ light on the 20th and 21th Century experience of drug – when the experience has to do not only with social protestation, but also with immoderate consumption, loneliness and death.