Michel Foucault

Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison

In the Middle Ages there were gaols and dungeons, but punishment was for the most part a spectacle. The economic changes and growing popular dissent of the 18th century made necessary a more systematic control over the individual members of society, and this in effect meant a change from punishment, which chastised the body, to reform, which touched the soul. Foucault shows the development of the Western system of prisons, police organizations, administrative and legal hierarchies for social control - and the growth of disciplinary society as a whole. He also reveals that between school, factories, barracks and hospitals all share a common organization, in which it is possible to control the use of an individuals time and space hour by hour.

Society must be defended : lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76

SOCIETY MUST BE DEFENDED is a full transcript of the lectures given by Foucault at the College de France in 1975-76. The main theme of the lectures is the contention that war can be used to analyse power relations. Foucault contends that politics isa continuation of war by other means. Thus, any constitutional theory of sovereignty and right is an attempt to refute the fact that power relations are based upon a relationship of conflict, violence and domination. The book is coloured with historical examples, drawn from the early modern period in both England and France, with wonderful digressions into subjects as diverse as classical French tragedy and the gothic novel.

Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique

« C’est, en principe, une histoire de la folie qu’on enferme, du Moyen Âge au XIXe siecle ; c’est, plus profondement, a travers l’etude de cette structure qu’est l’internement, une tentative pour etablir un dialogue entre folie et deraison ; c’est enfin une esquisse de ce que pourrait etre “une histoire des limites” – de ces gestes obscurs, necessairement oublies des qu’accomplis, par lesquels une culture rejette quelque chose qui sera pour elle l’Exterieur. » Maurice Blanchot. Date de premiere edition : 1972.

Orders of discourse

preferred to be enveloped in words, borne way beyond all possible beginnings. At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon to me. There would have been no beginnings: instead, speech would proceed from me, while I stood in its path a slender gap the point of its possible disappear-

Überwachen und Strafen: Die Geburt des Gefängnisses

Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984) gilt als prononcierter Vertreter des Poststrukturalismus und muss nach Umfang, Reichweite und Rezeption seiner Arbeiten als einer der einflussreichsten sozialwissenschaftlichen Philosophen des 20. Jahrhunderts gelten, was keineswegs heist, dass seine Thesen und Interpretationen unumstritten geblieben waren. Das trifft weniger auf seine fruhen Arbeiten zu, die sich mit dem Wahnsinn und seiner gesellschaftlich-kulturellen Bedeutung („Maladie mentale et Psychologie“, 1954, deutsche Fassung: „Psychologie und Geisteskrankheit“, 1968; „Histoire de la Folie“, 1961; deutsche Fassung: „Wahnsinn und Gesellschaft“, 1969) beschaftigen.

About the concept of the “dangerous individual” in 19th-century legal psychiatry

I would like to begin by relating a brief exchange which took place the other day in the Paris criminal courts. A man who was accused of five rapes and six attempted rapes, between February and June 1975, was being tried. The accused hardly spoke at all. Questions from the presiding judge: “Have you tried to reflect upon your case?” -Silence. “Why, at twenty-two years of age, do such violent urges overtake you? You must make an effort to analyze yourself. You are the one who has the keys to your own actions. Explain yourself.” -Silence. “Why would you do it again?” -Silence. Then a juror took over and cried out, “For heaven’s sake, defend yourself!” Such a dialogue, or rather, such an interrogatory monologue, is not in the least exceptional. It could doubtlessly be heard in many courts in many countries. But, seen in another light, it can only arouse the amazement of the historian. Here we have a judicial system designed to establish misdemeanors, to determine who committed them, and to sanction these acts by imposing the penalties prescribed by the law. In this case we have facts which have been established, an individual who admits to them and one who consequently accepts the punishment he will receive. All should be for the best in the best of all possible judicial worlds. The legislators, the authors of the legal codes in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, could not have dreamed of a clearer situation. And yet it happens that the machinery jams, the gears seize up. Why? Because the accused remains silent. Remains silent about what? About the facts? About circumstances? About the way in which they occurred? About the immediate cause of the events? Not at all. The accused evades a question which is essential in the eyes of a modern tribunal, but which would have had a strange ring to it 150 years ago: “Who are you?”

Michel Foucault : subversions of the subject

Contemporary issues in the history of ideas history and systems of thought a diagram of the Middle Ages drawing the subject subversions of the subject.

The Archaeology of Knowledge.

Part I: Introduction. Part II: The Discursive Regularities 1. The Unities of Discourse 2. Discursive Formations 3. The Formation of Objects 4. The Formation of Enunciative Modalities 5. The Formation of Concepts 6. The Formation of Strategies 7. Remarks and Cosequences Part III The Statement and the Archive 1. Defining the Statement 2. The Enunciative Function 3. The Description of Staements 4. Rarity, Exteriority, Accumilation 5. The Historical a priori and the Archive Part IV Archeological Description 1. Archeology and the History of Ideas 2. The Original and the Regular 3. Contradictions 4. The Comparative Facts 5. Change and Transformations 6. Science and Knowledge Part V: Conclusion Conclusion Index

The Gay Science

JEAN LE BITOUX: What is the reason that, of all your books, this first volume of The History of Sexuality is the one you think has been most misunderstood? MICHEL FOUCAULT: (long silence) It’s hard to say whether a book has been understood or misunderstood. Because, after all, perhaps the person who wrote the book is the one who misunderstood it. Because the reader would not be the one who understood or misunderstood it. I don’t think an author should lay down the law about his own book. I’d say I was surprised, in any case, by the way it was received by some readers. For it seemed to me that we’d reached a situation where it was possible to take up again some of these overused, overdetermined, and worn-out notions—for example, repression—and that we needed to see what this meant and, above all, to see how they could be made to function now, in a new situation, and within a battle [combat] or debate whose form has nonetheless changed in the last twenty years. I think things have settled down now, and this first impression of— how should I put it?—surprise has now been annulled. That being said, the impression of surprise was perhaps linked to the sim-

The language of space

Writing over the centuries was governed by time. Real or ficticious narrative was not the only expression of this form of belonging, nor was it the most essential; it is even likely that narrative hid the depth and the law of temporal belonging in the movement which best seemed to demonstrate its qualities. To the extent that writing was liberated from narrative, from its linear order, and from the great syntactical game of sequential tenses, it was thought that the act of writing was relieved of its ancient temporal obedience. In fact, the rigour of time did not affect writing through what was written, but in its very density, in that which made up its singular, immaterial being. Whether directed towards the past, submitting to chronological order or trying to untangle it, writing was caught in a fundamental curve which was that of the Homeric return, but which was at the same time that of the fulfillment of the Jewish prophets. Alexandria, birthplace of us all, had prescribed this circle for every occidental language: to write was to return, to go back to the origin, to relive the first moment; it was to be once more in the morning of time. Whence the mythical function of literature, that prevailed up to our present day; whence, too, its relationship with an ancient past; whence furthermore the privilege granted to analogy and to all the wonders of identity. Whence especially a repetitive structure that denotes the very being of literature.