Summary Of Discipline

Foucault himself worked in hospitals—or rather, on mental asylums—and has had first-hand experiences on the realities of life which could make them come into the arms of madness. In fact, he has written on such subject matter (Madness and Unreason: History of Madness in the Classical Age published in 1961) and his other various experiences have also been influenced by the things around him and his experiences: Foucault’s work can be traced to events in his present day.

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The Order of Things would have been inspired by the rise of structuralism in the 1960s, for example, and the prison uprisings in the early 1970s would have inspired Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975).

(European Graduate School EGS, 2008) Many authors and other famous philosophers and writers were mainly inspired by what they saw in their lifetime or even some other author which they have read. In Foucault’s case, it was all three, as he was inspired by Nietzsche and the “uprisings” in his time.

The book is a fusion of what can be called a history book and that of a book which contains opinions of a person, for that is exactly what the book brings—facts and fiction as Foucault gives factual evidences of what were supposedly recorded scenarios of prison life, while at the same time voicing out his convictions and opinions on the subject at hand: 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.

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The body as the major target of penal repression disappeared. (Foucault, 1977, pp. 7-8) As what the introduction of this paper states, Michel Foucault mainly focuses on the history and development of the prison system or penal system of the western world. This includes the more horrifying acts of execution and punishment of the penal system and the more subtle forms of imprisonment later on (Foucault, 1977).

It can be even concluded that the entire book may be a case study of some sort of how the penal system was born and changed and what led to these changes. Of course, these changes contributed to the modern technology which later developed, but more specifically, the changes can be attributed more to the fact that the world is changing, and times back then called for more orderly, effective, and systematic forms of punishment. Although the book contains many themes with regard to its context, there are still some which are more apparent than the others and needs to be focused on.

The following section of this paper will focus on the four themes of the Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of Prison. The Four Themes of Discipline and Punish As with all literary works and pieces, themes are important as they say what the whole masterpiece is driving at what is its point. More than what it is all about, the theme is a universal truth in which the work is supposed to portray, and this work by Michel Foucault naturally contains such themes.

The Display of Authority One of the most prominent themes of the book is the blatant display of power and authority of the penal system and the implementers—or, in the case of 18th century, it was the executioners. They can be even regarded as ruthless as they showed no mercy to the criminal. A criminal deserved to be punished and the punishment must be executed no matter how immoral it may be—both for the criminal and member of the public who were watching (Foucault, 1977).