Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the 'alienated', and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study.

Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.

Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.

We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.

Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.