anon_101 said in #1138 1y ago:
I believe it’s a difficult text to say anything new about, but we should try. I’m particularly interested in Foucault’s conception of power. I would like general comments on the legacy of Foucault. Perhaps nothing will come of it.
Let me speak of Foucault as if you had never heard of him. He was born in 1926. He was a French homosexual and rumored pederast that died of AIDS. His first philosophical idol was Heidegger; he discovered Nietzsche next. He left France in 1966, shortly after publishing The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Les Mots et les Choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines), a work about historical epistemologies (the idea, simplifying too far, here, that history should be divided into epistemes, which are temporal structures that give us the order of things by defining the base of knowledge in any period). He was not in France for May of 1968. It was, he said, March in that year in Tunisia, rather than any French intellectual movement, that drew him into the political debate. When he returned to France, he founded the Prisons Information Group, which was dedicated to research on and activism for prisoners. He began working on this book—Discipline and Punish—in that period.
I would like to start with "The body of the condemned" (“Le corps des condamnés”) which is the first section of the first part of the book, titled “Torture” (“Supplice”).
https://monoskop.org/images/4/43/Foucault_Michel_Discipline_and_Punish_The_Birth_of_the_Prison_1977_1995.pdf
https://monoskop.org/images/2/22/Foucault_Michel_Surveiller_et_Punir_Naissance_de_la_Prison_2004.pdf
This is an attempt to describe two phenomena. The first is the disappearance of public punishment of criminals. The second is the shift away from corporal punishment. Inflicting pain in public on the body is replaced by reforming the soul in private. This is focused narrowly in this section on the legal system but will be expanded further in the book, based on Foucault’s understanding of the relationship between power and knowledge.
referenced by: >>1915
It seems silly to in