50 Years of Discipline and Punish: A Book as Effective as a Bomb and Beautiful as Fireworks

Abstract

In this study, we do not seek to diagnose the effects or repercussions of Michel Foucault's work in Brazil and the world. Nor do we propose to judge all uses of his writings. As the title states, this is a brief essay marking fifty years since the book-event "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison." Inspired by Foucault's genealogical analysis of the struggle against power and the study of power relations, we highlight how major critiques and theses in philosophy, history, and the social sciences domesticate and capture the book's effectiveness. We argue that the strength of Discipline and Punish lies in its diagnoses and hypotheses. These have not always been so celebrated over the past fifty years, especially those concerning the inseparability of Foucault's political activism and the writing of Discipline and Punish. Its critique of humanism privileged the praise of Western progress and understood prison as that which produced the humanization of punishment. This critique ignored the relationship between the creation of man by the human sciences and disciplinary and surveillance tactics. The work also presents hypotheses that prison produces delinquency and the delinquent, with the aim of organizing and controlling popular illegalities. This is one of the main reasons for its success and permanence among us. Despite this, Foucault still diagnosed processes, in his own time, that were capable of restricting the use of prison in Western societies and transforming their internal functioning. The text also touches on the fleeting presence of a child's singular life and its discourse, understood as an illegality that remained rebellious to disciplinary coercion. We conclude that the insurrections of subjugated knowledge are the explosive and beautiful effects that continue to be animated by Discipline and Punish.