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🪵 The Threshold

Public torture was spectacle designed to display sovereign power publicly

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tagsja-picks, deepthinking, xref, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, category/causal-relationships
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 83

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Public torture was spectacle designed to display sovereign power publicly

Evidence

Furthermore, torture forms part of a ritual. It is an element in the liturgy of punishment and meets two demands. It must mark the victim: it is intended, either by the scar it leaves on the body, or by the spectacle that accompanies it, to brand the victim with infamy; even if its function is to ‘purge’ the crime, torture does not reconcile; it traces around or, rather, on the very body of the condemned man signs that must not be effaced; in any case, men will remember public exhibition, the pillory, torture and pain duly observed. And, from the point of view of the law that imposes it, public torture and execution must be spectacular, it must be seen by all almost as its triumph. The very excess of the violence employed is one of the elements of its glory: the fact that the guilty man should moan and cry out under the blows is not a shameful side-effect, it is the very ceremonial of justice being expressed in all its force. Hence no doubt those tortures that take place even after death: corpses burnt, ashes thrown to the winds, bodies dragged on hurdles and exhibited at the roadside. Justice pursues the body beyond all possible pain. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 83

Categorization

  • DEEPTHINKING: This is the chapter’s pivot: torture exists not to punish the body but to make power visible — the justification that the later disciplinary regime must replace.
  • XREF: The claim that punishment’s function is to display power publicly, not to deter or correct, directly prefigures Foucault’s contrast with Bentham’s panoptic economy of power in the later chapters. — connects to: The chain-gang spectacle fused public torture ceremony with the path to prison — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 394; Public torture and execution was among the most popular spectacles of eighteenth-century France. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 15; Public punishment served to reconstitute the sovereign’s injured authority — Khaled Fahmy, All the Pasha_s Men_ Mehmed Ali, his…, 675 (+18 more)

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