Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

More than 250 years ago, Robert-François Damiens was quartered in Gray Square in Paris for attempting to assassinate King Louis XV. The description of his monstrous execution begins "Discipline and Punish" — one of the most revolutionary books in modern social theory. The bloody spectacle of the execution allows Foucault to demonstrate the differences between individual violence and state violence, and to show how over time the main object of state control becomes not the body, but the soul of the criminal. The evolution of surveillance and punishment gradually transforms crude state violence into a complex mechanism of total biopower, enveloping the modern individual in their everyday life and shaping a society of total control.