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The paper focuses on Michel Foucault's early monograph, Maladie Mentale et Psychologie (1954/62); specifically the focus is on the issue of anxiety, which Foucault treats as central to pathological signification. Through a close reading of the text of Maladie Mentale and a comparison of the work to interpretive trends in French psychoanalytic theory in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper argues that anxiety as a discursive phenomenon overruns psychological discourse as well as Foucault's own theoretical engagement of such discourse. In conclusion, the paper finds that the voice of unreason Foucault detects in psychological discourse is the anxiety of theory confined within the limits of individual psychology.

The paper reconsiders the events of May 1968 in light of the various attempts to explain and theorize the politics of the student revolution in France. Drawing on contemporary accounts of May '68 as well as historical reflections on the revolution, the paper constructs a historically and politically "horizontal" theory; the structure of the barricades is used as a model for such a political theory. In the Foucauldian and Deleuzian sense of an active form of theory, a "horizontal" approach effectively politicizes theory and enables it to continue the seemingly failed efforts of the student protestors.