engleski

Power and Punishment: Types of Power and Forms of Punishment in Foucault

Among the most notable contributions of Michel Foucault's understanding of society and politics, two interrelated problématiques strongly stand out: his research of the operations of power and his historical genealogy of penal policy, both elaborated in the 1970s. The relationship between power and punishment can be formulated almost as a hypothesis according to which a type of power determines the modalities of punishment, setting the scene for the creation of penal policy with which political power is inextricably linked. I want to offer such a reading of Discipline and Punish—not as a longue durée historical work, but as a toolbox for contemporary research of punishment that starts with a nominalist understanding of power. In the theoretical part of the paper I will try to connect famous places of Foucault's analytics of power with the forms of punishment that are sometimes not easily distinguished from the episodes of political violence. The so-called sovereign power, democratic or despotic, punishes the body in the theatre of cruelty as a form of political ritual, while disciplinary power, the ‘anatomo-politics of the body’, positions the body in space and time, disciplining it with different techniques within and outside the carceral system. The operations of biopolitics, which is converted to thanatopolitics by the discursive caesura of racism, punish the population of “the Others, ” while the pastoral power, sacral or secularized as governmentality, can more easily be connected with the more subtle forms of parapenal management of the subjects. In the empirical part of the paper, I connect the exposed scheme with the episodes and examples from the general and comparative history of punishment and, most importantly, I show its relevance for the interpretation of punishment in the political present.

Foucault ; types of power ; forms of punishment

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