Punishment in Michel Foucault: Beyond Docile Bodies

The sociology of punishment often presents punishment in Michel Foucault's thought as a primarily instrumental social practice, whose most notable product is the formation of docile bodies characterized by submission to a power impervious to resistance. This perspective stems from a reading of Discipline and Punish that considers Foucault's characterization of punishment as inattentive to the relationship that this social practice maintains with values and the moral dimension of society, sometimes understood as "cultural" elements that go beyond power relations. This article aims to show that, for Foucault, punishment produces, beyond simple docile bodies, the most diverse modes of subjectivation, including those of delinquency, insurrection, resistance, and counter-conduct. The second and third courses taught by Foucault at the Collège de France, Theories and Penal Institutions and The Punitive Society, as well as the conference series Truth and Juridical Forms, will be used for this purpose. This material represents the bulk of Foucault's work on punishment in the first half of the 1970s, before the publication of Discipline and Punish. In the concluding remarks, it is pointed out that in the philosopher's work, punishment can be understood not only as subordinate to the functioning of instrumental or negative relations of power defined in advance and producers of experiences of subjection - necessarily unilateral - but also, and above all, as a tool capable of producing values and, on a larger scale, morality and the multiple experiences of subjectivation that correspond to it. Foucault's texts on punishment thus remain an object of study, dialogue and confrontation for researchers interested in explaining punitive phenomena today.