Foucault Religion

Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman’s work was centralised around there two different concepts of how your identity is formed through the process of power and expert knowledge. This Essay will discuss the ideas of Michel Foucault who was a French Social Theorist. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge and how both of these are used as a form of social control through society. The essay will look at Foucault’s work in The Body and Sexuality, Madness and Civilisation and Discipline and Punish which displays how he conceptualised Power and identity on a Marxist and macro basis of study. The Essay will also address the Ideas of Erving Goffman who was A Canadian Born Sociologist who’s key study was what

Panopticism, a social theory based on Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and developed by Michel Foucault describes a disciplinary mechanism used in various aspects of society. Foucault’s Discipline and Punish discusses the development of discipline in Western society, looks in particularly at Bentham’s Panopticon and how it is a working example of how the theory is employed effectively. Foucault explains, in Discipline and Punish that ‘this book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge’ (Foucault, 1977) and opens with accounts of public execution and torture revealing how law and order is created because of the shift from these to prison rules and discipline. Foucault describes the quarantining and

The work focuses in how punishment functions from within, targeting actual mechanisms of penal power and their way of operating. The relation between power-body-knowledge is a central point in Foucault’s book. Although, modern punishment is seen as more humane, it is still a tool of domination and subordination. According to Foucault power is: ‘’…in thinking of the mechanisms of power, I am thinking rather of its capillary forms of existence, the point where power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies, and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, caring processes, and everyday lives. ‘’ (Foucault, Power/Knowledge p.39).

This is a summary of Michel Foucault's seminal work on the history of criminal punishment and social discipline as it transformed from punitive to correctional models during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In the chapter, “The body of the Condemned,” Foucault addresses the evolution of the punishment system and how it has gone from being a public spectacle to something that is done behind closed doors. Foucault opens the chapter with an extremely descriptive and gory representation of a public execution. The purpose of this was to display how execution have changed from being in the public eye to behind closed doors using the electric chair and legal injections. It was done in this fashion to deter individuals from committing heinous crimes. Today, the cost of prison time, fines, etc.. deter individuals instead. Punishment has become less about effecting the body and more about the changing the souls and integrating them back into society.

Foucault began to compare this new idea of surveillance, power and punishment of the Panopticon to the power during the Middle Ages by the King which was more public in contrast to the Panopticon. The Panopticon was more discrete. It was not a show or form of entertainment when someone was punished unlike when someone is punished with the King. By exploring this, Foucault demonstrated how surveillance has changed overtime.

What comes to mind when you hear the words “insane asylum”? Do such terms as lunatic, crazy, scary, or even haunted come to mind? More than likely these are the terminology that most of us would use to describe our perception of insane asylums. However, those in history that had a heart’s desire to treat the mentally ill compassionately and humanely had a different viewpoint. Insane asylums were known for their horrendous treatment of the mentally ill, but the ultimate purpose in the reformation of insane asylums in the nineteenth century was to improve the treatment for the mentally ill by providing a humane and caring environment for them to reside.

Michel Foucault was an unconventional philosopher in relation to the ideas and reasonings of law and why they are just. He takes a different approach than many of the most prominent philosophers in the study of the philosophy of law. If someone were to compare his ideals with the ideals of some of the most prominent law philosophers an interesting total theory of the philosophy behind law could be created. The intentions of this writing are to relate and compare Michel Foucault with many of his predecessors in order to create an interpretation of the philosophy of law that is unique and interpretative.

Change over time; that is a common theme with everything in the world. The concept of punishment is no different in that regard. In the 16th and 17th century the common view for punishing people was retaliation from the king and to be done in the town square. In what seemed to be all of a sudden, there was a change in human thinking, the concept of punishment changed to a more psychological approach compared to a public embarrassment/torture approach. The following paragraphs will discuss the development of prisons and what in fact gives people gives people the right to punish; as well as the overall meaning and function of prisons. The work by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison will help with the arguments

In Michael Foucault’s work, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, he discusses how we are always being watched. That the way society has been structured has forced us to always think someone with more power is watching us therefore we should behave better. In his work he puts forward his main ideas and arguments which are power and knowledge, the body, the history of the soul, prison and society, and paradox and contrast. He observes and or studies the relationship between each term and elaborates on each one of his

According to Foucault, power does not belong to the individual, but to the system, to the institution. In his essay on Discipline and Punish, Foucault presents his idea of the panopticon mechanism, a mechanism in which visibility is a trap. With little importance over the actual individual in the role of the observer or of the observed, the object of the system is total power over the observed. Due to the unique shape of the panopticon, there are no corners and thus no blind spots for the observed to hide in. The private space is replaced by the public one. Furthermore, as final evidence of total control, the observed never knows for sure if they are being watched or not, as they can’t see the observer (Foucault 200-205). Foucault further argues that this system is followed by any government institution, placing the society under permanent observation. Individuals might try to evade the system, but achieving liberation and freedom is not something that anyone could do. Dostoevsky’s famous novel, Crime and

This part of the paper will provide a comparison with a theorist previously discussed in a lecture. The theorist with whom Michael Foucault’s arguments will be compared to is Emile Durkheim. Durkheim sees crime as functional. He says that if there was no crime, all our values would be dispersed--these values are laws. These laws are observed by sanctions and punishments attached to it. However, in order for these laws to exist, there must be a punishment, thus, for there to be a punishment, there has to be crime. Repressive law, according to this classical theorist was based on punishing for the evil doing of the criminal through revenge. Durkheim believes that a crime is not collective and when one goes against the core values of society, one threatens the entire order of society. Therefore, this theorist would agree with Foucault that when disciplining a criminal, he or she should be stripped of their freedom and when

Foucault examines madness in the 18th and 19th century in his study. He shows the kinds of craziness if understood like that, the term craziness as Foucault defines it, isn’t a bad term or to be ashamed of, it all started with leprosy, which is an infectious disease that was in the renaissance era, and with the results of this disease, the government had to lock the sick people in order to keep sovereignty in the kingdom because this disease destroyed a lot of habitant areas in Europe, and from this idea locking up social outcasts and dangerous people started. These places were called lazar houses, mostly it had the medical staff that took care of sick people, and from this idea the asylum had flourished.

Punishments are presented as a public spectacle, an example to the masses of the treatment an evildoer deserves for such treachery. Troublemakers are torn to shreds by Napoleons dogs as they confess to crimes, leaving no animal to oppose the laws and the policies of those in charge. What began as a warning against further transgressions suddenly becomes an act of defiance as the workers confess to crimes they did not commit, each prisoner creating fanciful felonies in order to escape their doom, knowing that there will not be any more in life to live for, except the sweet release of death. As much as punishment is an effective way of normalizing judgement, it is also an effective way to promote more violence in retaliation. According to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the use of violence as a public spectacle assimilates the public to the concept of violence and therefore desensitizes them to the objective of punishment itself.

Those crimes are not enhanced by desire for money, ambition, or other by any other ordinary motive. The terror he spreads is entirely ideological and his motivations might be even called philosophical. One could venture to say that Joker, in his whole complexity, may serve as a personification of the main thought behind Foucault’s Madness and Civilization; the idea that madness is not a natural, unchanging thing, but rather depends on the society in which it exists. This book, however not purely philosophical, addresses two vital issues: the mutual implications of madness and confinement as well as the relationship between knowledge and power. Regarding the former, Foucault’s history explains how the mad came first to be confined; how they became identified as confined due to moral and economic factors that determined those who ought to be confined; how they became perceived as dangerous through their confinement, partly by way of atavistic identification with the lepers whose place they had come to occupy; how they remained confined, both physically in asylums and in the designation of being mad; and how this confinement subsequently became enacted in the figure of the psychiatrist, whose practice is “a certain moral tactic contemporary with the end of the eighteenth century, preserved in the rites of the asylum life, and overlaid by the myths of