Questions regarding Foucault

Some questions to consider for discussion on Tuesday night:

1. Foucault is highly invested in the concept of "genealogy," that is, tracing a political and historical trajectory of a particular idea, in this case, punishment and its connections to power relations. That being said, what do you see as useful in the concept of a genealogy? We tend to associate genealogy with tracing familial relations. Is there a way to transfer the notion of interrelatedness into other realms of thought? And to what end? In other words, why is it necessary to analyze the concept of power structures through the history of punishment?

2. Foucault argues late in his essay, "But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of the theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him into existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body" (30). According to this statement, what is the soul? And what is its relationship to the body? How does this effect the ways in which we are to begin analysing the uses and transformation of different forms of punishment?

3. Is there something perversely compelling about torture? What I mean is, what exactly makes torture and public punishment the "spectacle" that Foucault desribes? What is the role of the audience in producing this spectacle?

4. As Foucault asks on p. 16, "what would a non-corporal punishment be?"

5. How does the contemporary call for prison reform (by 49% of the American population) work into the Foucault's genealogy? Why the cry for reform and humanism, rehabilitation instead of punishment?

that's all.
See you tomorrow,
Cindy