LFU:online

Comprehension of Michel Foucault's thinking following his seminal study Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison; discussion of key terms of Social and Political Philosophy like "power", "discipline", "body", "penalty"; consideration of the question, how "surveillance" and "punishment" can be discerned in the present.

"We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it 'excludes', it 'represses', it 'censors', it 'abstracts', it 'masks', it 'conceals'. In fact, power produces", writes Michel Foucault in his litigious philosophical study Discipline & Punish. For power, continues Foucault, "produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge that may be gained of him belong to this production." With these words Foucault stresses that is again and again a question of power, how discipling rituals are defining - historically, institutionally, discursively, etc. - what it is to be a human. In this proseminar we shall address a variety of Foucault's programatic theses by focussing especially on a reading of his book Discipline & Punish, which itself marks something like a critical turning point in his thinking. Apart from that we will also involve further philosophical texts on the institution named prison in our debate (Angela Davis, Michelle Alexander, Judith Butler,...).

Reading proseminar; short papers followed by discussions. 

Written.

Foucault, Michel. Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses. Aus dem Französischen von Walter Seitter. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994. 

None

Additional literature will be mentioned in the proseminar.