Michel Foucault’s discussion on Dutch television with Noam Chomsky, moderated by Fons Elders, is of course well known. 

The interview was part of a series, also including dialogues between A.J. Ayer and Arne Naess, Karl Popper and John Eccles, and Leszek Kołakowski and Henri Lefebvre. Edited transcripts of the discussions were published in the book Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind. The Foucault-Chomsky discussion is widely reprinted; the others less so. As part of his work for that discussion, Elders interviewed Foucault at his Paris apartment.

In that interview, unseen for a long time before being rediscovered and published in 2014 as a small book entitled Freedom and Knowledge, Foucault says that publishers have tended to illustrate his work on madness with Bruegel, Bosch and Goya. But he has another painting in mind: Frans Hals, De regentessen van het oudemannenhuis, the regents or regentesses of the men’s almshouse. He discusses it about 2 minutes into the video.

The painting is found, in a fairly poor quality black and white reproduction, in the 1972 Gallimard re-edition of Histoire de la folie, which is now out of print. It is not in any other French or English editions, and it is not discussed in the book. (On the different editions, see here.)

Here’s what Foucault says in the published interview with Elders:

So from here, well, if I were asked to illustrate with visual art the history of madness, I would not choose what my publishers ordinarily choose for the covers of my books. In general they pick Bruegel, Bosch, sometimes they choose Goya. That is not what I would choose. The problem basically is to show the transition from Bruegel to Goya; that is, how we moved from a certain experience of madness, which was, as it were, an objective experience. Madness was characterized with bizarre and imaginary figures that travelled the world, passed through it, and swarmed there; such was the experience of madness in the 16th century. And in the 19th century we see the emergence with Goya, with Fuseli, with Blake, of the subjective expression, as if it were from within madness, of what the mad feel, which Bruegel did not know.

Having come now into broad daylight, it’s as if we could finally see, hear, know, what was inside of madness. How did such passage from Bruegel or Bosch to Goya, Fuseli and Blake happen? I would say that it is through an experience that found its pictorial expression in one of the most famous paintings of Dutch art, by Frans Hals, that is to say, in “The Regents”. It is in “The Regents” of the hospital that my historical research on madness is illustrated best. There around a table are these five old women whose job it is to hold, to run this house of imprisonment, where during the 17th and later during the 18th century, all socially worthless people, the troublemakers were imprisoned. These women are actually the expression of our society’s rationalization that sets madness apart.

At the center of the painting we see a closed hand-held fan. This is the symbol of all pleasures, of society’s futility folded up on itself, excluded. Looking at both sides [of the painting], we can also see on the right a woman holding her big register under her hand; that’s the accounting of life, of things. And on the left, we see a woman holding coins in her hand; that is, basically the West’s accounting economy. Together they hold back the experience of madness. And it is from here on that the science of madness was able to develop. My history of madness is indeed best illustrated from that Frans Hals painting (pp. 26-27).

As far as I’m aware, the only other (very brief) mention of Frans Hals by Foucault is in a 1972 interview ‘Le grande enfermement’, text 105 in Dits et écrits. It is translated in the collection of texts about the Prisons Information Group, Intolerable. There, Foucault describes it as “one of the most unsettling [bouleversants] pieces ever painted in the West… an extraordinary work of which Claudel said some very beautiful things” (Vol II, p. 296; Quarto vol 1, p. 1164; Intolerable, p. 267). It is worth noting that while Foucault calls it The Regents, that is usually used to describe the pair to this painting, which is more commonly The Regentesses. The editors specify that Foucault’s reference is to Paul Claudel, “Introduction à la peinture hollandaise” in his L’œil écoute.

Claudel says of the “five sinister ladies” of this painting that “Neither in Goya nor in El Greco is there anything so masterful and so terrifying, for even hell holds fewer terrors for us than the intermediate zone”. He goes on, describing them as “ghouls”, the middle one as having a “deceitful face made into a beak by a hideous grin [which] indicates that we are dealing with something in her that is more implacable than justice, which is nothingness”. He admits it Is hard “to describe this phosphorescent emanation, this vampiric aura, that emanates from these five figures, as if from decomposing flesh, and I would almost be tempted to say, if it were possible, from a [decomposing] soul” (p. 42). That’s what Foucault described as “some very beautiful things”!

The only discussion I know of Foucault’s interest in the painting is in the introduction to Gary Shapiro’s 2003 book Archaeologies of Vision Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying (pp. 12-18). Shapiro was writing before the publication of the interview with Elders, so he had only the inclusion of the painting and the brief comment in the 1972 interview to draw upon, but he develops an interesting reading, also translating part of Claudel’s commentary. Shapiro rightly notes that the 1972 interview is around the time of the publication of the new edition of the book, and we might add that the 1971 interview with Elders was presumably conducted around the time Foucault was deciding on the material to be included and excised. 

The edition in print in France in the Gallimard Tel series has for its cover a detail from one of the images in Goya’s Los Caprichos series, known as “Ya tienen asiento [they’ve already got a seat]”, of women balancing chairs on their heads. That has been used on most of the editions of the full text in France – the exception is the 1972 edition which has no cover image, but De regentessen van het oudemannenhuis inside. The full translation of the text in English has a painting by Goya, and its forthcoming reedition uses the final image from William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, The Madhouse for its cover.

References

Paul Claudel, “Introduction à la peinture hollandaise”, L’œil écoute, Paris: Gallimard, 1967, 9-68.

Fons Elders ed. Reflexive Water: The Basic Concerns of Mankind, London: Souvenir Press, 1974.

Fons Elders ed. Michel Foucault Freedom and Knowledge: A Hitherto Unpublished Intervew, trans. Lionel Claris, Amsterdam: Elders Special Productions, 2014.

Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique, suivi de Mon corps, ce papier, ce feu et La folie, l’absence d’œuvre, Paris: Gallimard, 1972 [1961].

Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, eds. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, Paris: Gallimard, four volumes, 1994.

Gary Shapiro, Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzsche on Seeing and Saying, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

Kevin Thompson and Perry Zurn eds. Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, trans. Perry Zurn and Erik Beranek, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

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This is a revised and expanded version of a post from December 2015. It is the 86^th post of a weekly series, posted every Sunday throughout 2025, and continuing into a second year. The posts are short essays with indications of further reading and sources. The pieces are not as formal as something I’d try to publish more conventionally, but are hopefully worthwhile as short sketches of histories and ideas. They are usually tangential to my main writing focus, a home for spare parts, asides, dead-ends and possible futures. I hope there is some interest in them. They are provisional and suggestions are welcome. A few, usually shorter, pieces in a similar style have been posted mid-week. I wasn’t sure I’d keep to a weekly rhythm throughout 2026, but have ideas for at least a few more pieces.

The full chronological list of ‘Sunday histories’ is here, with a thematic ordering here.