Abstract
I WILL START WITH a somewhat playful hypothesis. You know that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries one entertained the idea of classifying societies into two types according to the way in which they dealt with their dead. Thus a distinction was made between cremating and burying societies.1 I wonder whether we could not attempt to classify societies, not according to the fate they reserve for the dead, but to the fate they reserve for those of the living whom they wish to be rid of, according to the way in which they bring those who seek to evade power under control, to how they react to those who in one way or another overstep, break, or get around the laws.*
Classification of societies: cremating and burying; assimilating and excluding. Inadequacy of the notion of exclusion. The psychiatric hospital. Inadequacy of the notion of transgression. ∽ Object of the lectures: critique of the notions of exclusion and transgression, and analysis of the subtle tactics of the sanction. (I) The four penal tactics: 1. exclusion; 2. compensation; 3. marking; 4. confinement. ∽ Initial hypothesis: classification of societies of exclusion, redemption, marking, or confinement. ∽ Possible objections and reply: the same penalties have different functions in the four penal tactics. Example of the fine. Example of the death penalty. Damiens and the sovereign’s power. Present day death penalty as redoubled confinement. (II) Establishing the autonomy of the level of penal tactics: 1. situating them within the sphere of power; 2. examining political struggles and disputes around power. ∽ Civil war as framework of power struggles: tactics of struggle and penality; strategy of confinement.
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Notes
English translation by A. M. Sheridan Smith, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London: Tavistock Publications, 1973) p. 166 (describing an important fact of civilization of the same “of the same order as … the transformation from an incinerating to an inhuming culture”).
See C. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, “Terre humaine,” 1955) p. 448
English translation by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman, Tristes Tropiques (London: Penguin Classics, 2012) p. 388
The anthropological analysis of cannibalism, linked to the classification of societies as assimilating or excluding, was developed by Alfred Métraux (1902–1963), in particular in: La Religion des Tupinamba et ses rapports avec celle des autres tribus Tupi-Guarani (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1928) pp. 124–169
See I. Combes, La Tragédie cannibale chez les anciens Tupi-Guarani, Preface by Pierre Chaunu (Paris: PUF, coll. “Histoire et decadence,” 1994)
English translation by Graham Burchell, Abnormal. Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975, English series editor, Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Picador, 2003) pp. 101–104
Foucault is no doubt referring here to the works of René Girard, who had just published La Violence et le Sacré (Paris: Grasset, 1972)
English translation by Patrick Gregory, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977)
English translation by Yvonne Freccero, The Scapegoat (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
English translation by Yvonne Freccero, The Scapegoat (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
English translation by Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977) p. 259, when describing the chain-gang at the start of the nineteenth century.
English translation by Ian McLeod, “The Order of Discourse” in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981)
English translation by Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa, History of Madness (London and New York: Routledge, 2009) pp. 3–6.
See M. Foucault, “Préface à la transgression” (Critique, 195–196: Hommage à G. Bataille, August-September 1963, pp. 751–769)
English translation by Stephen W. Sawyer, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling. The Function of Avowal in Justice, eds., Fabienne Brion & Bernard E. Harcourt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014) p. 238.
English translation by Graham Burchell, Lectures on The Will to Know. Lectures at the Collège de France 1970–1971, English series editor, Arnold I. Davidson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) pp. 183–201.
see J. R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, “Princeton Classics,” 1970) p. 29
see F. Olivier-Martin, Histoire du droit français des origines à la Révolution (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1984 [1950]) p. 68.
see, C. Debuyet, F. Digneffe, A. P. Pires, Histoire des savoirs sur le crime et la peine (Brussels: Larcier, “Crimen,” 2008) vol. 2, p. 44.
This figure of the homo sacer in archaic law, “that figure of the man whom one can kill without committing murder, but that one cannot formally execute,” will be studied by Giorgio Agemben in his Homo sacer. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita (Torino: Einaudi, 1995)
English translation by Daniel Heller-Roazen, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
English translation by John Johnston, “The Anxiety of Judging” in M. Foucault, Foucault Live, ed., Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989) pp. 157–178
For a presentation of Foucault’s commitment against the death penalty, see A. Kiéfer, Michel Foucault: le GIP, l’histoire et l’action, philosophy thesis, November 2006, Université de Picardie Jules Verne d’Amiens, 2009, pp. 169–172.
English translation by David Macey, “Society Must Be Defended.” Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1972, English series editor, Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Picador, 1997), p. 89 sq.
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Harcourt, B.E., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (2015). 3 January 1973. In: Harcourt, B.E., Ewald, F., Fontana, A. (eds) The Punitive Society. Michel Foucault. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137532091_1
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