Fabian Freyenhagen

Fabian Freyenhagen is a philosopher by training, but works in the wild borderlands between disciplines. Based at the University of Essex, where he is also a member of its Human Rights Centre, his current research and collaborative endeavours focus on distress and its social context. An expert on the early Frankfurt School, he is most recently drawing inspiration from Michel Foucault in thinking critically about our psychiatric present.  He directs a new and emerging research initiative, Centre for Investigating Contemporary Social Ills. 

The project

Title: The History of Madness Revisited: A Foucault-Inspired Critical History of Our Psychiatric Present

"The objective of this project is to understand better the significance of the fundamental post-1980 shift in how distress has been conceptualised and responded to; how this shift reflects changes in society; and to open up new avenues for conceptualising and responding to distress. Drawing on Adorno and Foucault, the project discloses how in this shift progress and regress have been deeply entangled, including how the pairing of normal-pathological became reconceptualised along the way. It shows that, as a result of this entanglement, our societies hamper their own efforts in addressing the contemporary societal challenge of rising distress. It responds to the problem that Western societies are stuck on a particular conceptual framing and associated set of practices that do not serve their members well. We need to understand how we got there, and how else we could proceed, such that we are not governed as much. The result will be to contribute towards freeing us from the icy grip of pathologising (and medicalising) distress; and enable greater imagination and practical experimentation for responding in less normalising and individualising ways to this distress, focusing instead on social ills."

Hosting institution: Université Paris Nanterre

Selective Bibliography

• Why Professor Habermas would fail a class on Dialectic of Enlightenment. Res Philosophica 101.2 (2024): 245-269.
• Adorno’s Politics Revisited, in Oxford Handbook to Adorno, E. Hammer & M. Shuster (eds.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024.
• The linguistic turn in the early Frankfurt School: Horkheimer and Adorno. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 61.1 (2023): 127–148.
• Normality Proper to the Time is Sickness. Krisis 41.2 (2021): 87-88.
• Acting Irrespective of Hope. Kantian Review 25.4 (2020): 605-630.