Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Life, texts, contexts
- 2 Works: madness and medicine
- 3 Works: the death of man
- 4 Works: authors and texts
- 5 Works: crime and punishment
- 6 Works: The History of Sexuality
- 7 Critical receptions
- Afterword
- Notes
- Selected further reading
- Index
- The Cambridge Introductions to …
5 - Works: crime and punishment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Life, texts, contexts
- 2 Works: madness and medicine
- 3 Works: the death of man
- 4 Works: authors and texts
- 5 Works: crime and punishment
- 6 Works: The History of Sexuality
- 7 Critical receptions
- Afterword
- Notes
- Selected further reading
- Index
- The Cambridge Introductions to …
Summary
Prison has the advantage of producing delinquency, an instrument of control over and pressure on illegality, a substantial component in the exercise of power over bodies, an element of that physics of power which gave rise to the psychology of the subject.
Michel FoucaultThis chapter will explore in depth two works on criminality and regimes of discipline. I, Pierre Rivière, Having Killed My Mother, My Sister and My Brother: A Case of Parricide in the Nineteenth Century (1973) is a collection of legal and medical reports, accompanied by a long and extraordinarily detailed written confession by a French peasant who, in 1835, murdered his mother and siblings. The documents are edited and commented on by Foucault and his team of sociological researchers. Foucault's interest in the case lay in its susceptibility to be read according to the method of genealogical research he adapts and borrows from his readings of Nietzsche (see pp. 12–16 of the present book), which proceeds from the postulate that knowledge is produced as the effect of local operations of power. The case of Rivière afforded the opportunity to reflect upon the ways in which the murderer became the ground for a discursive battle between and among the contemporary medico-legal disciplines. It is a good example of Foucault's notion that force fields of discourse constitute individuals according to discrete categories of social subject, in this case criminal/medical categories.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Michel Foucault , pp. 69 - 85Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2008