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🪵 The Threshold

The reformed penalty shifted its target from the body to subtler suffering

Properties2
tagsja-picks, define, deepthinking, causal_relationships, trade, singleton, xref, category/causal-relationships
aliases@foucault_discipline_1975, loc. 43

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The reformed penalty shifted its target from the body to subtler suffering

Evidence

Among so many changes, I shall consider one: the disappearance of torture as a public spectacle. Today we are rather inclined to ignore it; perhaps, in its time, it gave rise to too much inflated rhetoric; perhaps it has been attributed too readily and too emphatically to a process of ‘humanization’, thus dispensing with the need for further analysis. And, in any case, how important is such a change, when compared with the great institutional transformations, the formulation of explicit, general codes and unified rules of procedure; with the almost universal adoption of the jury system, the definition of the essentially corrective character of the penalty and the tendency, which has become increasingly marked since the nineteenth century, to adapt punishment to the individual offender? Punishment of a less immediately physical kind, a certain discretion in the art of inflicting pain, a combination of more subtle, more subdued sufferings, deprived of their visible display, should not all this be treated as a special case, an incidental effect of deeper changes? And yet the fact remains that a few decades saw the disappearance of the tortured, dismembered, amputated body, symbolically branded on face or shoulder, exposed alive or dead to public view. The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 43

Categorization

  • DEFINE: Introduces Foucault’s core distinction between punishment of the body and ‘more subtle, more subdued sufferings’ — reframes the humane-reform explanation as an analytical question.
  • DEEPTHINKING: A paradigm-shifting refusal to accept ‘humanization’ as explanation, opening the alternate reading that gentler punishment is itself a technique of control, not its abolition.
  • XREF: connects to: The shift from spectacle to carceral punishment was a technical mutation, not a softening — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 393; Penal power shifted its target from the body to the mind — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 162; Penal reform shifted punishment from the act to the offender’s character — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 160 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

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