HANDOUT ON FOUCAULT, DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH

Assignment for next time

Michel Foucault, "The Body of the Condemned" from Discipline and Punish: 3-31 (on reserve)

Michel Foucault, "What Calls For Punishment?" from Foucault Live: 279-92. (on reserve)

Study questions for "The Body of the Condemned" (1975)

1. The opening pages of this chapter are among the most famous and disturbing things that Foucault ever wrote. These pages are upsetting not only because of the acts described in the account of Damiens's execution, but also because of what Foucault seems to think about later developments in the history of punishment. There are several questions here:

a. Which of these developments is most crucial to Foucault?
b. What, according to Foucault, is the usual way of accounting for such developments?
c. What makes Foucault suspicious of this usual account? Why does he think that it's insufficient or misleading?

3. In these pages, for the first time, we see Foucault not just talking about "genealogy" but actually engaged in it. After seeing him at work, do you have a better sense of what he thinks about the following topics:

a. power and the relationship between power and knowledge?
b. the body, its "political economy," and its history?
c. the practice and "rules" of genealogy itself?

Study questions for "What Calls for Punishment?" (1983-4)

1. Foucault insists that he has not meant to play the role of the "prophet intellectual" (282). But what are his precise reasons for disavowing that role? And what actually keeps the "specific intellectual" (which is what Foucault says he wants to be) from turning into a prophet in spite of himself?

2. At various points in this interview, Foucault is asked to say something about the possible practical consequences of his work. Were you surprised by his responses to any of these questions? What, in particular, did you make of his response to the idea of a "society without prisons"? Were you surprised by Foucault's reluctance to embrace this idea? Were you surprised by his view of the "risks" associated with the idea? Are the "risks" that he mentions the ones that you would have imagined?

What next?

• Homepage for English 60A
  
• Syllabus for weeks four and five (Derrida and Foucault)
  
• Students' responses to Discipline and Punish
  
• Links to internet resources dealing with Foucault