What Does Foucault Say In Discipline And Punishment?

by | Last updated on January 24, 2024

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What does Foucault say in discipline and punishment? Foucault

seeks to analyze punishment in its social context, and to examine how changing power relations affected punishment

. He begins by analyzing the situation before the eighteenth century, when public execution and corporal punishment were key punishments, and torture was part of most criminal investigations.

What is Foucault’s view on punishment?

Foucault ultimately suggests that

it is the use and subjugation of power that influences an institutions use of punishment

. He rejects any notion that the development of this system had been motivated by any humanitarian ideals, or that this philosophy of punishment was initially intended as a form of rehabilitation.

What does Foucault say about power and punishment?

How does Foucault describe discipline?

What characteristics of punishment does Foucault study?

How does Foucault characterize disciplinary power?

According to Foucault disciplinary power

characterises the way in which the relations of inequality and oppression in modern western societies are (re)produced through the psychological complex

.

What were Foucault’s main ideas?

Foucault challenges the idea that

power is wielded by people or groups by way of ‘episodic’ or ‘sovereign’ acts of domination or coercion, seeing it instead as dispersed and pervasive

. ‘Power is everywhere’ and ‘comes from everywhere’ so in this sense is neither an agency nor a structure (Foucault 1998: 63).

What was Foucault’s philosophy?

Foucault’s entire philosophy is

based on the assumption that human knowledge and existence are profoundly historical

. He argues that what is most human about man is his history. He discusses the notions of history, change and historical method at some length at various points in his career.

What is a statement for Foucault?

According to Foucault, a ‘discourse’ is a group of statements which is different from other groups of statements. A ‘statement’ is a linguistic unit which is different from a sentence, proposition, or act of speech.

3

. A statement is

any series of signs which may appear in an enunciative field

.

What are the two main types of power according to Foucault?

We discuss this relationship between power and resistance by drawing on Foucault’s ‘triangle’: (I)

sovereign power

; (II) disciplinary power; and (III) biopower.

What was Foucault’s best known for?

What is bio power Foucault?

What is Foucault’s view on human nature?

According to him,

our conceptions of human nature are acquired from our own society, civilization and culture

. He gave, as an example of this, late 19th and early 20th century Marxism which, according to Foucault, borrowed its conception of happiness from bourgeois society.

What is Foucault’s theory called?


Michel Foucault
Doctoral advisor Georges Canguilhem

What is Foucault’s theory of discourse?

Discourse, as defined by Foucault, refers to:

ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them

. Discourses are more than ways of thinking and producing meaning.

Was Foucault a Marxist?


Foucault began his career as a Marxist

, having been influenced by his mentor, the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, as a student to join the French Communist Party.

What is an example of disciplinary power?

How does power work according to Foucault?

What is the difference between sovereign and disciplinary power?

Why is Foucault controversial?

He rose to prominence in controversy, his ponderously scholarly 1966 book The Order of Things becoming a bestseller because

marginal denunciations of humanism and Marxism therein brought it massive publicity in the form of shrill denunciations by elements of the French intellectual establishment

.

What is sovereign power Foucault?

What does Foucault mean by subject?

At the base of Foucault’s view in “The Subject and Power” is the base assumption that power is not wielded through oppression but rather through the manufacturing of “individuals”. Foucault notes the double meaning of “subject”, both

a self-aware topic of something and something which is controlled, subjected

.

What is biopolitics according to Foucault?

What is Foucault’s main argument?

In his 1975 book Discipline and Punish, Foucault argued that

French society had reconfigured punishment through the new “humane” practices of “discipline” and “surveillance”

, used in new institutions such as prisons, the mental asylums, schools, workhouses and factories.

What is bio power Foucault?

Foucault’s concept of biopower describes

the administration and regulation of human life at the level of the population and the individual body

– it is a form of power that targets the population (Rogers et al 2013).

Amira Khan
Author
Amira Khan
Amira Khan is a philosopher and scholar of religion with a Ph.D. in philosophy and theology. Amira's expertise includes the history of philosophy and religion, ethics, and the philosophy of science. She is passionate about helping readers navigate complex philosophical and religious concepts in a clear and accessible way.