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Discipline and Punish (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R669
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Discipline and Punish (Hardcover)
Series: The Macat Library
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Michel Foucault is famous as one of the 20th-century's most
innovative thinkers - and his work on Discipline and Punish was so
original and offered models so useful to other scholars that the
book now ranks among the most influential academic works ever
published. Foucault's aim is to trace the way in which
incarceration was transformed between the seventeenth and twentieth
centuries. What started as a spectacle, in which ritual punishments
were focused on the prisoner's body, eventually became a matter of
the private disciplining of a delinquent soul. Foucault's work is
renowned for its original insights, and Discipline and Punish
contains several of his most compelling observations. Much of the
focus of the book is on making new connections between knowledge
and power, leading Foucault to sketch out a new interpretation of
the relationship between voir, savoir and pouvoir - or, 'to see is
to know is to have power.' Foucault also dwells in fascinating
detail on the true implications of a uniquely creative solution to
the problems generated by incarcerating large numbers of criminals
in a confined space - Jeremy Bentham's 'panopticon,' a prison
constructed around a central tower from which hidden guards might -
or might not - be monitoring any given prisoner at any given time.
As Foucualt points out, the panopticon creates a prison in which
inmates will discipline themselves, for fear of punishment, even
when there are no guards present. He goes on to apply this insight
to the manner in which all of us behave in the outside world - a
world in which CCTV and speed cameras are explicitly designed to
modify our behavior. Foucault's highly original vision of prisons
also ties them to broader structures of power, allowing him to
argue that all previous conceptions of prison are misleading, even
wrong. For Foucault, the ultimate purpose of incarceration is
neither to punish inmates, nor to reduce crime. It is to produce
delinquency as a way of enabling the state to control and of
structure crime.
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