Summary Of Michel Foucault S Discipline And Punish

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

A brilliant work from the most influential philosopher since Sartre. In this indispensable work, a brilliant thinker suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.

Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century’s most innovative thinkers – and his work on Discipline and Punish was so original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever published. Foucault’s aim is to trace the way in which incarceration was transformed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. What started as a spectacle, in which ritual punishments were focused on the prisoner’s body, eventually became a matter of the private disciplining of a delinquent soul. Foucault’s work is renowned for its original insights, and Discipline and Punish contains several of his most compelling observations. Much of the focus of the book is on making new connections between knowledge and power, leading Foucault to sketch out a new interpretation of the relationship between voir, savoir and pouvoir – or, ‘to see is to know is to have power.’ Foucault also dwells in fascinating detail on the true implications of a uniquely creative solution to the problems generated by incarcerating large numbers of criminals in a confined space – Jeremy Bentham’s ‘panopticon,’ a prison constructed around a central tower from which hidden guards might – or might not – be monitoring any given prisoner at any given time. As Foucualt points out, the panopticon creates a prison in which inmates will discipline themselves, for fear of punishment, even when there are no guards present. He goes on to apply this insight to the manner in which all of us behave in the outside world – a world in which CCTV and speed cameras are explicitly designed to modify our behavior. Foucault’s highly original vision of prisons also ties them to broader structures of power, allowing him to argue that all previous conceptions of prison are misleading, even wrong. For Foucault, the ultimate purpose of incarceration is neither to punish inmates, nor to reduce crime. It is to produce delinquency as a way of enabling the state to control and of structure crime.

Foucault's writings on power and control in social institutions have made him one of the modern era's most influential thinkers. Here he argues that punishment has gone from being mere spectacle to becoming an instrument of systematic domination over individuals in society - not just of our bodies, but our souls. Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.

Michel Foucault remains to this day a thinker who stands unchallenged as one of the most important of the 20th century. Among the characteristics that have made him influential is his insistent blurring of the border separating philosophy and literature and art, carried out on the basis of his confronting the problem of modernism, which he characterizes as a permanent task. To that end, even his most explicitly historical or strictly epistemological and methodological enquiries, which on their surface would seem not to have anything to do with literature, are full of allusions to modernist writers and artists like Mallarme, Baudelaire, Artaud, Klee, Borges, Broch-sometimes fleetingly, sometimes more extensively, as is the case with Foucault's life-long devotion to Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot, and de Sade. Understanding Foucault, Understanding Modernism shows, on the one hand, that literature and the arts play a fundamental structural role in Foucault's works, while, on the other hand, it shifts to the foreground what it presumes to be motivating Foucault: the interrogation of the problem of modernism.

Dіѕсірlіnе & Punish (1975) is a сеlеbrаtеd wоrk оf rеnоwnеd French philosopher аnd ѕосіоlоgіѕt Mісhеl Foucault. Fоuсаult studies thе hіѕtоrу оf forms оf роwеr, punishment, dіѕсірlіnе and ѕurvеіllаnсе from thе Frеnсh Ancien Régime through tо more mоdеrn tіmеѕ, ѕееіng іt аѕ a rеflесtіоn оf a сhаngіng ѕосіеtу.

ABOUT THE BOOK To read and understand Foucault is to know that you are not a free man, but in fact a prisoner/guard in a penitentiary named Western Society. Discipline and Punish changed the way the humanities and social sciences understood power and the way that I understood my place in the world. It answers questions like why non-conformists dress like all the other non-conformists and why we all try to hide the fact that we are singing to ourselves in our cars while simultaneously watching other people to see if they are singing to themselves. We all participate in maintaining the norms and rules of our society. In the Rebellious sixties, young people were attacking the establishment but they did not realize how deeply entrenched the power was and how it flowed, not from the top down, but out of all levels of society as a ubiquitous force. MEET THE AUTHOR Davidson received his BA from the University of Windsor and his MA from Carleton Universitity. He teaches history at Eldercollege in Windsor, Ontario and has published a biography of Charles G.D. Roberts. You can follow his blog at www.hubpages.com/bkeithdavidson. EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK Part one “Torture” begins with the gruesome execution of convicted regicide Robert-Francois Damiens who had attempted to murder Louis XIV and had his sins cleansed by making Amene Honorable. The rest of the book then has to explain how we have moved in only two hundred years from burning hot pincers removing the flesh from your bones to sitting in prison with three meals a day. The societal pressure for the move towards lenience began only decades after the grizzly death of Damiens and came from all levels of society. This period saw the focus of judicial punishment shift from the body to the soul. To use Foucault’s phrase, “The soul is the prison of the body.” The theatrical displays that accompanied of the earlier forms of punishment are now reserved for the court room. The second part “Punishment” starts with a discussion of the reform movement of the late eighteenth century that forced sovereigns and governments in general distance themselves from the violent act of killing. Judgement was put on display and punishment was hidden away. While capital punishment still exists, it is now done clinically and behind closed doors. Society itself was changing. There was a shift away from violent crimes into property related crimes. It is important to note that while many of the middle class philosophers were writing about this problem the demand for change came from all levels of the society. The lower classes were becoming more sympathetic to the plight of the condemned and even tried to help them at times. “Discipline” is the third part of the book and it deals with the training of the soul so that the society can exert power over it. This section deals with taking the human in any form and moulding it into the desired form. Foucault uses the example of the soldier and how this used to be a position that a man had to fit before he could join an army. Foucault saw a shift in the eighteenth century whereby armies started to believe that they could make soldiers out of any man no matter his condition. This philosophy extends into the society as school, hospital, and prison all have their methods, tests, and drills designed to create the model citizen. This section also explores how these institutions use the “political technology of the body” to control the space and time of the individual to create proper behaviour. Schedules and time tables are used to control the mind and organize the body. Buy a copy to keep reading!

Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish is one of the best-selling works of critical theory and a key text on many undergraduate courses. However, it is a long, difficult text which makes Anne Schwan and Stephen Shapiro's excellent step-by-step reading guide a welcome addition to the How to Read Theory series. Undergraduates across a wide range of disciplines are expected to have a solid understanding of Foucault's key terms, which have become commonplace in critical thinking today. While there are many texts that survey Foucault's thought, these are often more general overviews or biographical précis that give little in the way of robust explanation and discussion. In contrast, How to Read Foucault's Discipline and Punish takes a plain-speaking, yet detailed, approach, specifically designed to give students a thorough understanding of one of the most influential texts in contemporary cultural theory.