Beyond docile bodies and biopolitics: punishment in Michel Foucault

• Grant number: 24/09634-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate (Direct)
• Start date: July 01, 2025
• End date: August 31, 2027
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Marcos César Alvarez
• Grantee: Jade Gonçalves Roque
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Despite being unavoidable and continuing to be cited as a reference, Michel Foucault's work on the subject of punishment has been the subject of divergent interpretations (Garland, 1990, 1997, 2002; Fassin, 2017; Smith, 2008; Pratt, 1993; Spierenburg, 2004; Salla, 2007; 2000; Borch, 2015). The objective of this research, taking this lack of consensus into account, is to carry out a transversal reading of Foucault's work, pointing out, at each moment of his work, the meanings that punishment admits within the author's analytical scheme. At the end of this operation, the most general meaning that punishment assumes in the philosopher's thought will be provided. The hypothesis to be evaluated is that punishment in Foucault is a positive social practice and produces experiences of subjectivation. From this point of view, in the author's work, punishment would not be restricted to a unidirectional fabrication of docile bodies but, above all, to the forging, always disputed, of the horizon of possibilities regarding what the subject can be - a horizon in the midst of which the docile body constitutes itself as just one among the multiple historically possible cases. To carry out our task of reconstructing Foucault's conception of punishment, we will focus on the texts produced between 1961 and 1984 in which Foucault addressed the theme of punishment by explaining its functioning or giving more indirect clues about its social significance. These texts will be systematically read. In addition to the books where Foucault directly mentions punishment, articles and texts dealing with the topic will be discussed. These will be compiled from Dits et écrits (2001) and by the means of visits to the archives where most of the work of Foucault available for consultation today is found: the Fonds Foucault from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France - BnF and the collection of the Center Michel Foucault deposited at the Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine - IMEC, both located in France. Ultimately, and taking into account that Michel Foucault's work remains an unavoidable reference for the studies of violence, crime and punitive and control techniques in modern Western societies, the organization and interpretation of Foucault's work on punishment - a task that has not yet been satisfactorily carried out by national and international sociology, according to our literature review - is part of the effort to understand more broadly the contemporary meaning of punishment in Brazil and Western societies.