The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972-1973

by Foucault, Michel (2015)

Key Passage

the introduction inside the prison of the general principles governing the economics and politics of work [outside] contradicts all of the penal system’s previous functioning. What we see appearing through these two forms is the introduction of time into the capitalist system of power and into the system of penality. Into the system of penality: for the first time in the history of penal systems, one no longer punishes through the body or through goods, but through time to live. What society will appropriate to punish the individual is the time leftto live. Time is exchanged against power. [And] behind the wage-form, the objective of the form of power put to work by capitalist society is essentially for it to be exercised on people’s time: the organization of the worker’s time [in] the workshop, the distribution and calculation of this time in the wage, the control of leisure, of the worker’s life, saving, pensions, and so on The way in which power framed time so as to be able to control it from start to finish made possible, historically and [in terms of] relations of power, the existence of the wage-form. It needed this overall hold of power on time.* Thus, what allows us to analyze the punitive regime of crimes and the disciplinary regime of labor as of a piece is the relationship of the time of life to political power: that repression of time and repression through time, that kind of continuity between workshop clock, production line stopwatch, and prison calendar. (p.72)

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The Punitive Society

Translator

Burchell, G.

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