Molecular revolution: psychiatry and politics

The essays translated in this volume include principally articles that would be considered political (in a wide sense of this term) rather than philosophical, but in the tradition of Guattari and Deleuze there can be no compartmentalization of disciplines: philosophy, politics, structuralist linguistics, psychoanalysis (or rather its undoing), micro-sociology - all frontiers are violated but violated on principle.

This practice simply pushes in a more radical direction what is in fact an established tradition in French intellectual life in this century: that one should straddle in a sufficiently 'magisterial' manner at least two disciplines. Thus Georges Canguilhem combines philosophical work with the analysis of the categories of medical thought and the history of biological concepts; Jean Toussaint Desanti, who started off in philosophy, became a professional mathematician in order to pursue his sort of philosophy more effectively. The polymathy of Foucault and René Thom is already familiar to English language readers.