The nineteenth century brings about a seemingly “gentler” sort of punishment, rhetorically aimed at the correction of the soul, which is nevertheless a highly structured regulation of the body that produces docility. That is, what can be thought at all in a given context and how did it come to be that way? The measure is not man, but discourse.įoucault offers a genealogy of the development of the modern regime of social control that is, how power controls bodies. He investigates the “conditions of possibility” for thought in any given period or domain of knowledge. It is in this way that we can characterize Foucault as a post-humanist. More than anything, Foucault is interested in how external structures (like institutions of power) produce subjects. For Foucault, this change signals not “a quantitative phenomenon: less cruelty, less pain, more kindness, more respect, more ‘humanity,’” but “a displacement in the very object of the punitive operation” from the body to the soul. The second is little more than a time-table regulating the daily life of young prisoners in Paris. The first, in 1757, is the grisly public execution of Damiens, convicted of attempting to kill Louis XV- he was tortured, drawn, quartered, and finally burned. Foucault dramatizes this transformation by opening the book with two penal schemes separated by 80 years. Discipline and Punish, subtitled The Birth of the Prison, is Michel Foucault’s reading of the shift in penal technologies from torture to imprisonment that took place in Europe beginning in the eighteenth century.
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