24 quotes
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The soul is the prison of the body.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations
Discipline and Punish (1977)
We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.
Discipline and Punish (1977)