Freedom and the self

In Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish, “The Body of the Condemned” is a section dedicated to the concept of power and its relationship to modern punishment, which focuses primarily on the soul of the criminal, a sharp contrast to the punishments aimed to inflict pain on the body centuries ago. Foucault describes power as the means by which the soul of the criminal is born via “punishment, supervision and constraint.” (29) It is for this reason he sees power as a tactic employed in order to achieve certain goals not limited to those aforementioned.

[...] This “exchange of power” is seen at multiple points in this section, and is even observed in another context from a description of power Foucault borrows from the historian Kantorowitz. This paper aims to reveal the extent of Foucault’s ambiguity and attempt to find a resolution within the reading. The theme of power is central to the entire book, almost certainly because Foucault sees power as the means by which discipline and punishment arise in the first place. The concept of power relations allows one to examine and study its roles in the penal system; by analysis of penal leniency as a technique of power, one might understand both how man, the soul, the normal or abnormal individual have come to duplicate crime as objects of penal intervention; and in what way a specific mode of subjection was able to give birth to man as an object of knowledge for a discourse with a ‘scientific’ status.” This line also brings up another important concept relevant to his discussion on power, and that is its relationship to knowledge. [...]

[...] Therefore the concept of this king’s body would merely be stating that the relationship of king to his subjects is where power truly lies, and not with the king’s body or his soul. Similarly applying this to the others who “inherited” the power to judge criminals, it simply means that the relationship between a psychiatrist or a psychologist and a criminal inherently possesses power, but the people themselves do not. If Foucault truly does see power as primarily a form of relations between people and objects of knowledge, then we cannot chastise him for seeing the potential of power to be transferred or possessed, for he does not mean it in a literal sense. [...]