Two ideas strike me as foundational to Foucault's introduction to this text: the idea of the condemned as the kings shadow and the idea of the soul as a duplication of the body put into effect by strategies of power, both on page 29. We can understand (and Foucault says as much when he calls his undertaking a "genealogy of the modern soul") that what is being attempted is an attempt to shed light on our modern souls by analyzing the historical conditions of discipline and punishment. In juxtaposing the images of torture and the modern prison (the art and the economy, to paraphrase), Foucault wants us to begin thinking about this inward movement that he is attempting to track. My question in all this is: If he is going to connect this to the modern liberal state (which he will), I will be very interested to see how he explains what sort of motivating forces necessitate this duplicating move.
Monday, May 5, 2008
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Excellent question. And to give away part of the answer: that which motivates the emergence of discipline according to Foucault is nothing so grand as economy (Marx) or psyche (Freud) but something much more quotidian.
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