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| Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison | 
| Author: Michel Foucault
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Category: Book
Buy Used: $23.00
Collectible (2) from $100.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  38 reviews
Sales Rank: 333520
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 333
ISBN: 0394499425
EAN: 9780394499420
ASIN: 0394499425
Publication Date: 1977
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: TEXT CLEAN, YOU LIKE IT, DUST COVER BACK EDGE HAS LIGHT TEAR , SPEEDY SHIPPING ASAP, BLESSINGS R 58-2
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Product Description
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 33 more reviews...
 Society is a Prison-and Vice Versa October 26, 2008
By the time that Michel Foucault published DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH in 1975, he had already made a reputation as the champion of the downtrodden. In his earlier pseudo-historian-fictional texts MADNESS AND CIVILIZATION (1961), THE BIRTH OF THE CLINIC (1963), THE ORDER OF THINGS (1966), and THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF KNOWLEDGE (1969), he had attracted a great deal of attention in France as one who offered a politically correct alternative to mainstream society's insistance that the locus of interest in any culture must lie in the center. Those who did not fit in this center--the outcasts, the insane, the incarcerated--must be relegated to the marginalized periphery of that culture where they would simply languish in a morass that the center insisted was eminently justified. Along came Foucault to state that the truest way to judge the ethics of any society was to examine how those in the center treated those on the periphery. In a not unsurprising conclusion, he asserted that the further one was from the center, the more likely it was that one would be first stigmatized as aberrant, then isolated, and ultimately reduced to a miserable self who existed only as the object of a dehumanizing exercise of power by those who symbolized this system. In fact, if you examine the entire corpus of Foucault, you will learn that he sees society locked in a bear hug of power exercises, with those in the center who have it and exercise it over those on the marginalized periphery who lack it.
Before 1975, Foucault was known mostly only in France where his earlier texts had not yet reached beyond the borders. When DISCIPLINE AND PUNISH was translated into English, Foucault became an instant celebrity. It seemed that every subgroup that saw itself as marginalized--gays, the insane, radical feminists, and the incarcerated--could directly and immediately relate to his premise that the exercise of power by the powerful over the powerless was not unlike Orwell's O'Brien from 1984 telling a tormented Winston Smith that power exists for its own sake.
Foucault saw a link between power and knowledge. Power could not be exercised without the knowledge needed to control inmates in a manner that had to wait until technology had advanced sufficiently by the Industrial Revolution to order the lives of inmates every minute of the day. It was no coincidence, he claimed that the predecessors of the prison--the monastic orders, hospitals, and schools--all were built around the same basic mold: identify each candidate by rank, isolate him, and reduce his capacity to operate as a free-thinking individual. The more advanced that a society became, the more likely that it would punish an inmate who persisted in his original world view--hence the "punish" of the title. When Foucault begins his text with the graphic dismemberment of the inmate Damiens in Paris in 1757, he makes it clear that penology was still heavily invested in torture for the sake of torture. It was not until a century later that wardens would use physical coercion for what was to them a higher purpose--to create a new and presumably higher order of human, one who was more moral for his incarceration. Foucault agrees that such an overly optimistic view of the efficacy of prison reform was nonsense. Released inmates were very likely to commit further crimes and hence return to prison.
What then do we today make of Foucault? Unfortunately, an objective view of Foucault shows numerous and grievous flaws in both his basic assumptions and methologies. He makes constant errors of fact, date, time, and place. Events that he assigns to one century happen in another. His bibliography is rife with sources that are so obscure and out of date that it is impossible to verify Foucault's veracity. Further, his personal habits of indulging in sado-masochism all too often crop up in his works to suggest that his true agenda is to bare his tormented soul rather than to explicate how the modern prison system came to be. Ultimately, his many readers are left with taking his word that it was only the interlocking relation between power and the marginalized that can explain the source of the marginalization. I do not take his word for it so I do not recommend Michel Foucault as a true and unbiased critic of anything let alone so complicated a system as the modern prison.
 Obscurantist? Esotericist? Obfuscatory? July 31, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
The historical exegeses are largely superfluous and distract from the points of argumentation.
There are many elaborate dilations of the main propositions which do little more than meander towards the next one(s), as opposed to elucidating their logical-historical connection.
Foucault gives political manifesto content-length propositions that are reasonably insightful, in a basically historical-novelistic theory fiction format. "We are less Greek than we think." --Foucault is more anti-Enlightenment than he realizes and less "Nietzschean" so much as a paraphrastic derivative thinker than he would like to be.
The description of power relations does not necessarily reveal the ideology governing it. In fact, it does much to mythologize an omnipresent non-entity of whom we see and experience only its effects. One suspects there are only effects of power, of ideology; consequences which cannotn be telekeniticized by any localizable 'gaze' but follow materially from human actions.
15. He who does not know how to put his will into things at least puts a MEANING into them; that is, he believes there is a will in them already (principle of 'belief').
(Twilight of the Idols, "Maxims and Arrows" epigram 15)
As Foucault ought to have known, there is no meaning to power except in the feeling of its increase. The only gaze that is belongs to "the Other". In this sense, Foucault has articulated the narcissistic element of power. On the whole however, he identifies with it since he cannot dissociate power from its celebration: the carnival event of discipline and punish, the panoptical voyeurism of the carceral gaze. Naval gazing social theory par excellence (Knowledge is Power and Power is Ideology, therefore Ideology is Knowledge.) The gaze is a fiction unless the alleged 'observed' sees that he is being watched, there is no subject without the choice presented by the Other; the neurosis of the subject hypersensitive to the Other withstands the hermeneutical uncertainty with horror, inevitably directed at himself, --that there is nothing to see. Foucault's text makes ideology power's Echo, when it is really ideology that echoes Power. Ideology is the ignorance and absence of Power that would be the knowledge required to suspend ideology for authentic choices.
The Birth of the Prison is the death of the social, the death of the Other, the fettering of the individual himself to ideology. One must ask, "Where is ideology?" Foucault offers merely the dazed "everywhere and nowhere," as the gaze without eye, the predicate without subject, Donald Rumsfeld's "known unknowns" which are nothing at all. Discipline and Punish does not address the lexical of 'known knowns' because the language of oppression, of ideology requires a counter affirmation of Power. One assumes power or renounces it, and one must be doubly strong for the latter. Given the current state of events, its disavowal is a gesture into a void: one has no power to renounce if one is not the State itself. "Je suis le etat." Since it has been more difficult to define the "Je", the sovereign, one speaks of exploitation as a structural and institutional function. This impotent anthropomorphism of theory merely compounds the problem of ideology. Exploitation is an action committed man against man, and these actions must be identified with what systems enable these impingements on the sovereignty of other men.
"l'ecrasez l'infamie!"
Foucault does not crush the infamy. He does reveal its ankles slightly however this will not titillate, unless one does not already see the pudeurs of the clearly unclothed emperors of the various reigning ideologies. Ideology abhors clarity. Read Foucault, then forget Foucault.
 Excellent and thought-provoking. May 3, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Other reviews have done a nice job of explaining the textual benefits of the book, so let me explain its practical benefit. I'll keep this short and sweet. This is an excellent text to trot out during a sociology or other social science class when you want to egomanically dominate the conversation for a bit. It provides such food for thought that you can really wax poetic on the power of punishment over the body and soul of the individual. I say this with all seriousness. So few people read philosophical texts that, if you enjoy doing so, it almost feels like an obligation to introduce these discussions in the classroom. This is not a light summer read by any stretch of the imagination, but if you enjoy the challenge of unpacking complex concepts, you'll enjoy this read.
Knowledge, power, and domination January 20, 2008
By examining the rise of prison systems in Western culture, Foucault demonstrates the ways modern nation-states exert their power to dominate their citizens. This is a great book for anyone interested in power formations as well as continental theory.
Well researched, controversial book December 31, 2007
4 out of 5 found this review helpful
This is one of Michel Foucault's most accessible books (though still pretty heavy going). If in Madness and Civilization, Foucault analyzed the birth of insane asylums and in The Birth of the Clinic the birth of the hospital, in Discipline and Punish, it's the turn of the prisons. The book starts with a gruesome description of the public drawing and quartering of failed regicide Damiens in 1757. Then he goes on to quote a benign prison system of the 1830s. What changed between the two dates? While other authors would consider the birth of modern imprisonment as a triumph of progressive ideals (in comparison with what went on before), Foucault saw this instead as one aspect of increasing social and political control. While greatly researched, one immediately asks itself what Foucault wanted? Did he care about any improvement in the social conditions of prisoners? Or did he believed we should do with prisons altogether? And in which case, what about dangerous criminals? I think Foucault never wanted to answer these questions. I think it's telling that towards the end of his life (after this book was written) Foucault was a fan of the repressive and theocratic regime of Khomeini in Iran. In this, he was similar to those communist intellectuals in the West who criticized failings in their own countries but overlook much worse abuses (and crimes) in the Soviet Union. Another quibble is that the book is so French-centric (with some analysis of developments in England): he takes the evolution of imprisonment in France as an indication of the whole world.
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