For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

References for Theme: Foucault Citations

  • Foucault, M
    • On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)
      (p.10) Now I know that there are people— their names and nationality are not important— who say: yes, of course, if Bodin does these two things, if he is both theorist of raison d’État t and the great caster out of demon-mania, both demonologist and theorist of the State, this is quite simply because nascent capitalism needed labor and witches were also abortionists, it was a question of removing the checks to demography in order to be able to provide capital with the labor it needed in its factories of the nineteenth century. You can see that the argument is not...
    • On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)
      (p.128) A practical consequence of this conception of the preparation for baptism in Tertullian— and here I refer you to chapter 6 of De paenitentia, which, together with De baptismo, is the most important text for understanding all this: “the sinner,” he says, in this time of preparation for baptism, “must lament his sins even before the time of pardon,” for, he says, and this is the text I was just talking about, “the time of repentance ( pénitence ) is that of periculi i and metus , danger and fear. To those who are about to enter the water, I...
    • On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)
      (p.143) LAST WEEK I TRIED to explain the passage in Tertullian, from chapter six of De paenitentia , in which he said that we are not immersed in the baptismal waters in order to be purified, but that we are already purified deep in our hearts when we arrive at baptism. I think this passage, which I have tried to clarify by other passages from De paenitentia or from De baptismo , points to a series of important distinctions in Tertullian. The idea that one must arrive at baptism already purified, and so the idea that it is not baptism that,...
    • On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)
  • Foucault, Michel
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.113) Hence the domain we must analyze in the different studies that will follow the present volume is that deployment of sexuality: its formation on the basis of the Christian notion of the flesh, and its development through the four great strategies that were deployed in the nineteenth century: the sexualization of children, the hysterization of women, the specification of the perverted, and the regulation of populations- all strategies that went by way of a family which must be viewed, not as a powerful agency of prohibition, but as amajor factor of sexualization. The first phase corresponded to the need to form a "labor force" (hence to avoid any useless "expenditure,"...
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.120) If one writes the history of sexuality in terms of repression, relating this repression to the utilization of labor capacity, one must suppose that sexual controls were the more intense and meticulous as theywere directed at the poorer classes; one has to assume that they followed the path of greatest domination and the most systematic exploitation: the young adult man, possessing nothing more than his life force, had to be the primary target of a subjugation destined to shift the energy available for useless pleasure toward compulsory labor. But this does not appear to be the way things actually happened. On the contrary,the most rigorous techniques were formed and,...
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.126) There is little question that one of the primordial forms of class consciousness is the affirmation of the body; at least, this was the case for the bourgeoisie during the eighteenth century. It converted the blue blood of the nobles into a sound organism and a healthy sexuality. One understands why it took such a longtime and was so unwilling to acknowledge that other classes had a body and a sex-precisely those classes it was exploiting. The living conditions that were dealt to the proletariat, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, show there was anything but concern for its body and sex:l it was of little importance...
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.136) In any case, in its modern form-relative andlimited-as in its ancient and absolute form, the right of lifeand death is a dis symmetrical one. The sovereign exercisedhis right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or byrefraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life onlythrough the death he was capable of requiring. The rightwhich was formulated as the "power of life and death" wasin reality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, afterall, was the sword. Perhaps this juridical form must be referredto a historical type of society in which power wasexercised mainly as...
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.25) One of the great innovations in the techniques of power in the eighteenth century was theemergence of "population" as an economic and political problem: population as wealth, population as manpower or labor capacity, population balanced between its own growth and the resources it commanded.
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.36) All this garrulous attention which has us in a stew over sexuality, is it not motivated by one basic concern: to ensure population, to reproduce labor capacity, to perpetuate the form of social relations: in short, to constitute a sexuality that is economically useful and politically conservative?
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.5) By placing the advent of the age of repression in the seventeenth century, after hundreds of years of open spaces and free expression, one adjusts it to coincide with the development of capitalism: itbecomes an integral part of the bourgeois order. The minor chronicle of sex and its trials is transposed into the ceremonious history of the modes of production; its trifling aspect fades from view. A principle of explanation emerges after the fact: if sex is so rigorously repressed, this is because it is incompatible with a general and intensive work imperative. At a time when labor capacity was being systematically exploited,how could this capacity be allowed to...
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
      (p.95) Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a positionof exteriority in relation to power. Should it be said that one is always "inside" power, there is no "escaping" it,there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? Or that, history being the ruse of reason, power is the ruse of history, always emerging the winner? This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power...
    • The history of sexuality: An introduction, volume I (1978)
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.120) Discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a useful force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power, whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, “political anatomy”, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses and institutions.
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.121) in 1597 a prisoner was condemned to twelve years' imprisonment, which could be reduced to eight, if his behaviour proved satisfactory). Work was obligatory; it was performed in common (indeed the individual cell was used only as an additional punishment; prisoners slept two or three to a bed, in cells containing between four and twelve persons); and, for the work done, the prisoners received wages.
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.150) The gradual extension of the wage-earning class brought with it a more detailed partitioning of time 'If workers arrive later than a quarter of an hour after the ringing of the bell . . .' (Amboise, article z); 'if any one of the companions is asked for during work and loses more than five minutes . . .', 'anyone who is not at his work at the correct time . . .' (Oppenheim, article 7-8). But an attempt is also made to assure the quality of the time used: constant supervision, the pressure of supervisors, the elimination of anything that...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.174) (Quote covering pages 174 -75)But, the disciplinary gaze did, in fact, need relays. The pyramid was able to fulfil, more efficiently than the circle, two requiremens: to be complete enough to form an uninterrupted network - consequently the possibility of multiplying its levels, and of distributing them over the entire surface to be supervised; and yet to be discreet enough not to weigh down with an inert mass on the activity to be disciplined, and not to act as a brake or an obstacle to it; to be integrated into the disciplinary mechanism as a function that increases its possible...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.200) (Quote covering pages 200 - 01)And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.202) A real subjection is born mechanicalty from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.203) With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of each individual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation of miasmas, the effects of contagion confusing the clinical tables; among schoolchildren, it makes it possible to observe performances (without there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications and, in relation to normal development, to distinguish 'laziness and stubbornness' from 'incurable imbecility'; among workers, it makes it possible to note the aptitudes of each worker,...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.205) It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.215) Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by 'specialized' institutions (the penitentiaries or 'houses of correction' of the nineteenth century), or by institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal mechanisms of...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.232) This 'self-evident' character of the prison, which we find so difficult to abandon, is based first of all on the simple form of 'deprivation of liberty'. How could prison not be the penalry par excellcnce in a society in which liberty is a good that belongs to all in the same way and to which each individual is attached, as Dupon put it, by a 'universal and constant' feelingl lts loss has therefore the same value for all; unlike tlrc 6ne, it is an 'egalitarian' punishment. The prison is the clearest, simplest, most equitable of penalties. Moreover, it makes it...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.233) For the prison has a purpose, which is laid down at the outset: 'The law inflicting penalties, some of which are more serious than others, cannot allow the individual condemned to light penalties to be imprisoned in the same place as the criminal condemned to more serious penalties .. . although the penalty fixed by the law has as its principal aim the reparation of the crime, it also desires the amendment of the guilty man' (Real, 244). And this transformation must be one of the internal effects of imprisonment. Prison-punishment, prison-apparatus: 'The order that must reign in the maison...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.240) Several polemics that took place under the Restoration and the July Monarchy throw light on the function attributed to penal labour. First, there was the debate on the subject of wages. The labour of prisoners was remunerated in France. This posed a problem: if work in prison is remunerated, that work cannot really form part ofthe penalty; and the prisoner may therefore refuse to perform it. Moreover, wages reward the skill of the worker and not the improvement of the convict: 'The worst subjects are almost everywhere the most skilful workers' they are the most highly remunerated, consequently the most...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.241) There were strikes against the prison workshops: when a Chaumont glove-maker succeeded in organizing a workshop at Clairvaux, the workers protested, declared that their labour was dishonoured, occupied the manufactory and forced the employer to abandon his project (cf. Aguet, 3o-3r). There was also a widespread press campaign in the workers' newspapers: on the theme that the government encouraged penal labour in order to reduce 'free'wagesl on the theme that the inconveniences of these prison workshops were even more evident for women, who were thus deprived of their labour, driven to prostitution and therefore to prison, where these same women,...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.242) Penal labour cannot be criticized for any unemployment it may give rise to: with its limited extent, and its low output, it cannot have a general effect on the economy. It is intrinsically useful, not as an activity of production, but by virtue of the effect it has on the human mechanism. It is a principle of order and regularity; through the demands that it imposes, it conveys, imperceptibly, the forms of a rigorous power; it bends bodies to regular movements, it excludes agitation and distraction, it imposes a hierarchy and a surveillance that are all the more accepted, and...
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.244) The length of the penalty must not be a measurement of the 'exchange value' of the offencel it must be adjusted to the 'useful' transformation of the inmate during his term of imprisonment. It is not a timemeasure, but a time finalized. The form of the operation, rather than the form of the wages.
    • Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1979)
      (p.285) Erecting the barrier to separate delinquents from all the lower strata of the population from which they sprang and with which they remained linked has been a difficult task, especially no doubt in urban milieux. It has been a long and arduous undertaking. It has involved the use of the general principles of the 'moralization' of the poorer classes that elsewhere has had such crucial importance both from an economic and a political point of view (the acquisition of what might be called a 'basic legalism', which was indispensable from the time when custom was replaced by the system of...
    • The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of the history of sexuality (1986)
      (p.18) The case of prostitutes is different. Here the analysis setforth by Artemidorus is rather curious: in themselves women,as objects from which one derives pleasure, have a positivevalue; and prostitutes-whom the traditional vocabularysometimes calls "workers"-are there to furnish these pleasures,and they "give themselves without refusing anything. "There is, however, " a little disgrace" i n frequenting suchwomen--disgrace and also expense-which no doubt detractsa little from the value of the event forecast by the dream thatrepresents them.
    • The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of the history of sexuality (1986)
      (p.32) It is this principle that makes it good to dream of sexual intercourse with slaves: one profits from one's possessions; that which one has purchased for the benefit of labor yields the benefit of pleasurebesides.
    • The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of the history of sexuality (1986)
      (p.74) In its ancient form, marriage held no interest, had no reason for being, except insofar as, although a private act, it had legal effects or at least effects relative to status: handing down a name, instituting heirs, organizing a system of alliances, joining fortunes. This meant something only to those who were capable of developing strategies in such domains. As Paul Veyne says: "In pagan society, everyone did not marry, far from it. . . . Marriage, when one did marry, corresponded to a private objective: to transmit the estate to one's descendants, rather than to other members of the family or to the sons of friends; and it corresponded to...
    • The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of the history of sexuality (1986)
    • The History of Sexuality: The use of pleasure (1988)
      (p.152) The activity of landowners [within Xenophon's Oeconomicus], on the other hand, is practiced in the market-place, in the agora. where they can fulfill their duties as friends and as citizens, as well as in the oikos. But the oikos comprises more than just the house proper; it also includes the fields and possessions, wherever they may be located (even outside the boundaries of the city): "whatever someone possesses is partof his household"; it defines a whole sphere of activities.2 And this activity is connected to a lifestyle and an ethical order. The landowner's existence, ifhe takes proper care of his estate, is good for him first of all; in...
    • The History of Sexuality: The use of pleasure (1988)
      (p.155) We see, then, that relations between spouses are not questioned in themselves; they are not first seen as the simple relationship of a couple comprised of a man and a woman who might, in addition, have to attend to a house and family. Xenophon deals at length with the marital relation, but in an indirect, contextual, and technical fashion: he deals with it in the context of the oikos, as one aspect of the husband's governmentalresponsibility and with a view to determining how the husband will be able to make his wife into the co-worker, the partner, the synergos he needs for the reasonable practice of economy.Ischomachus is asked...
    • The History of Sexuality: The use of pleasure (1988)
      (p.158) Ischomachus dwells at length on all the advice he remembers giving his wife on how to store things inthe space of the house so that she might find what she has put away, thus making her home a place of order and memory. In order that they might work together in the exercise of these different functions, the gods endowed each of the two sexes with particular qualities. Physical traits, first of all : to men, who must work in the open air "plowing, sowing, planting, herding," they gave the capacity to endure cold, heat, andjourneys on foot; women, who work indoors, were given bodies that are less...
    • The History of Sexuality: The use of pleasure (1988)
    • "Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity" in Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1997)
      (p.167) If there is no resistance, there would be no power relations… So resistance comes first, and remains superior to the forces of the process; power relations are obliged to change with the resistance. So I think that resistance is the main word, the keyword, in this dynamic.
    • "Truth and Juridical Forms" in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Power (2001)
      (p.80-81) In feudal society and in many societies that ethnologists call “primitive,” the control of individuals is based on local insertion, on the fact that they belong to a particular place. Feudal power was exercised over men insofar as they belonged to a manor. Local geographic inscription was a means of exercising power. Power was inscribed in men through their localization. In contrast, the modern society that formed at the beginning of the nineteenth century was basically indifferent or relatively indifferent to individuals’ spatial ties: it was not interested in the spatial control of individuals insofar as they belonged to an estate, a locale, but onlyinsofar as it needed people...
    • "Truth and Juridical Forms" in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984: Power (2001)
      (p.86-87) Someone said that man’s concrete essence is labor. Actually, this idea was put forward by several people. We find it in Hegel, in the post-Hegelians, and also in Marx, the Marx of a certain period, as Althusser would say.Since I’m interested not in authors but in the function of statements, it makes little difference who said it or exactly when it was said. What I would like to show is that, in point of fact, labor is absolutely not man’s concrete essence or man’s existence in its concrete form. In order for men to be brought into labor, tied to labor, an operation is necessary, or a complex...
    • Archaeology of Knowledge (2002)
      (p.194) Lastly, there are important shifts between different archaeological ruptures – and sometimes even between discursive formations that are very close and linked by a great many relations. Let us take the disciplinesof languages and historical analysis: the great transformation that gave rise at the beginning of the nineteenth century to a historical, comparative grammar preceded by a good half-century the mutation inhistorical discourse: as a result, the system of interpositivity in which philology was involved was profoundly affected in the second half of the nineteenth century, without the positivity of philology ever beingput into question. Hence phenomena of ‘fragmented shift’, of which we can cite at least...
    • Archaeology of Knowledge (2002)
      (p.197) Archaeology does not describe disciplines. At most, such disciplines may, in their manifestdeployment, serve as starting-points for the description of positivities;but they do not fix its limits: they do not impose definitive divisionsupon it; at the end of the analysis they do not re-emerge in the samestate in which they entered it; one cannot establish a bi-univocalrelation between established disciplines and discursive formations.Let us take an example of this distortion. The linch-pin of Madness andCivilization was the appearance at the beginning of the nineteenth centuryof a psychiatric discipline. This discipline had neither the samecontent, nor the same internal organization, nor the...
    • Archaeology of Knowledge (2002)
    • Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 (2003)
      (p.48) [The Classical Age invented techniques of power] that can be transferred to very different institutional supports,to State apparatuses, institutions, the family, and so forth. The Classical Age developed therefore what could be called an "art of governing," in the sense in which "government" was then understood as precisely the "government" of children, the "government" of the mad, the "government" of the poor, and before long, the "government" of workers.
    • Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975 (2003)
    • Society must be Defended (2003)
      (p.194) The great adversary of Boulainvilliers and his successors is nature, or natural man. To put it a different way, the great adversary of this type of analysis (and Boulainvilliers's analyses will become instrumental and tactical in this sense too) is, if you like, natural man or the savage. "Savage" is to be understood in two senses. The savage— noble or otherwise—is the natural man whom the jurists or theorists of right dreamed up, the natural man who existed before society existed, who existed in order to constitute society, and who was theelement around which the social body could be constituted. When they look for the constituent point, Boulainvilhers...
    • Society must be Defended (2003)
      (p.241) In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we saw the emergence of techniquesof power that were essentially centered on the body, on theindividual body. They included all devices that were used to ensurethe spatial distribution of individual bodies (their separation, theiralignment, their serialization, and their surveillance) and the organization,around those individuals, of a whole field of visibility. Theywere also techniques that could be used to take control over bodies.Attempts were made to increase their productive force through exercise,drill, and so on. They were also techniques for rationalizingand strictly economizing on a power that had to be used in the leastcostly way...
    • Society must be Defended (2003)
      (p.31) We could ask how the rule of the bourgeoisie allows us to understand the repression of infantile sexuality.Well, it's quite simple: from the seventeenth or eighteenth century onward, the human body essentially became a productive force, and all forms of expenditure that could not be reduced to these relations,or to the constitution of the productive forces, all forms of expenditure that could be shown to be unproductive, were banished, excluded, and repressed. Such deductions are always possible; they are both true and false. They are essentially too facile, because we can say precisely the opposite. We can deduce from the principle that the bourgeoisie became a ruling class...
    • Society must be Defended (2003)
      (p.35) Now, an important phenomenon occurred in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the appearance—one should say the invention—of a new mechanism of power which had very specific procedures, completely new instruments, and very different equipment. It was, I believe, absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty. This new mechanism of power applies primarily to bodies and what they do rather than to the land and what it produces. It was a mechanism of power that made it possible to extract time and labor, rather than commodities and wealth, from bodies. It was a type of power that was exercised through constant surveillance and not in discontinuous fashion through chronologically defined...
    • Society must be Defended (2003)
    • Sécurité, territoire, population: cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (2004)
      (p.107) Comment, en effet, le problème de la population va-(-il permettre le déblocage de l'art de gouverner? La perspective de la population. la réalité des phénomènes propres à la population vont permettre d'écarter définiti vement le modèle de la famiIle et de recentrer cette notion d'économie sur quelque chose d'autre. En effet. cette statistique qui avait fonctionné jusque-là à l'intérieur des cadres administratifs et, donc. du fonctionnement de la souveraineté. cette même statistique découvre et montre peu à peu que la population a ses régularités propres : son nombre de morts, son nombre de malades. ses régularités d'accidents. La statistique montre également que la population comporte des effets propres...
    • Sécurité, territoire, population: cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (2004)
      (p.13) La discipline également. bien sûr. s'exerce sur le corps des individus, mais j'ai essayé de vous montrer comment. en fait. l'individu n 'est pas dans la discipline la donnée première sur laquelle elle s'exerçait. Il n'y ade discipline que dans la mesure où il y a une multiplicité et une fin, ou un objectif, ou un résultat à obtenir à partir de cette multiplicité. La discipline scolaire, la discipline militaire, la discipline pénale aussi. la disciplinedans les ateliers, la discipline ouvrière, tout ça. c'est une certaine manière de gérer la multiplicité, de l'organiser. d'en fixer les points d'implantation, les coordinations, les trajectoires latérales ou horizontales,les trajectoires...
    • Sécurité, territoire, population: cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (2004)
      (p.352) Troisième thèse que l'on trouve chez les économistes, c'est que la population ne constitue pas en elle-même un bien. Là encore, rupture essentielle. Dans le système de la police. celui que j'évoquais la dernièrefois, la seule manière dont la population était prise en considération. c'était d'y voir. premièrement, le facteur nombre: y a-t-il assez de population'? Et la réponse était toujours: il n'y en a jamais assez. Il n'y en ajamais assez, pourquoi? Parce qu'on a besoin de beaucoup de bras pour travailler beaucoup et fabriquer beaucoup d'objets. On a besoin de beaucoup de bras pour éviter que les salaires ne montent trop et garantir, par consé-.uent,...
    • Sécurité, territoire, population: cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (2004)
      (p.74) Mais surtout, si l'on veut favoriser la population ou obtenir que la population soit dans un rapportjuste avec les ressources et les possibilités d'un État, il faut agir surtout un tas de facteurs, d'éléments qui sont apparemment loin de la populationelle-même, de son comportement immédiat, loin de sa tëcondité,de sa volonté de reproduction. Il faut par exemple agir sur les tlux demonnaie qui vont irriguer le pays, savoir par où ces flux de monnaie passent,savoir s'ils irriguent bien tous les éléments de la population, s'ils nelaissent pas de régions inertes.Il va falloir agir sur les exportations: plusil y aura de demandes...
    • Sécurité, territoire, population: cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (2004)
      (p.79) Je crois que, pour résumer tout ceci, on pourrait dire que si on cherche l'opérateur de transformation qui a fait passer de l'histoire naturelle à la biologie, de l'analyse des richesses à l'économie politique, dela grammaire générale à la philologie historique, l'opérateur qui a fait ainsi basculer tous ces systèmes, ces ensembles de savoirs vers les sciences de la vie, du travail et de la production. vers les sciences deslangues, c'est du côté de la population qu'il faut le chercher. Non pas sous la forme qui consisterait à dire: les classes dirigeantes comprenant enfin l'importance de la population ont lancé dans cette direction les naturalistes qui, du...
    • Sécurité, territoire, population: cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (2004)
    • Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (2008)
      (p.223) What does bringing labor back into economic analysis mean? It does not mean knowing where labor is situated between, let’s say, capital and production. The problem of bringing labor back into the field of economic analysis is not one of asking about the price of labor, or what it produces technically, or what is the value added by labor. The fundamental, essential problem, anyway the first problem which arises when one wants to analyze labor in economic terms, is how the person who works uses the means available to him. That is to say, to bring labor into the field...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.107) I do not think that anything in the asylum brings to mind the organization of the familysystem; we think rather of the workshop, school, and barracks. Moreover, itis explicitly the military deployment of individuals that we see appearing[inj the work in the workshop, in agricultural work, and in work at school.For example, in his book of 1840 on Traitement moral, Leuret said that"whenever the weather permits, patients who are in a condition tomarch, and who cannot or do not wish to work, are brought together inthe hospital courtyard and drilled like soldiers. Imitation is such a powerful lever, even on the...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.127) Second, you can see that there is a sort of perfect social microcosm, a sort of little Utopia of general social functioning. The asylum is the reserve army of the farm proletariat; it is all those who, potentially,could work, and who, if they cannot work, wait for the moment when they can, and, if they do not have the ability to work, remain in the asylum vegetating. Then there is the place of productive work, which isrepresented by the farm. Then you have the institution in which those who benefit from the work and the profit are found. And to each of these levels corresponds...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.152) Here again, as a starting point, I think we can take the very subtle, very curious version that Leuret gives of this principle.His patient, M. Dupre, did not want to work on the grounds that he did not believe in the value of money: "Money has no value; there is nothing but counterfeit money" said Dupre,51 since I, Napoleon, am theonly person who has the right to mint coins. Consequently, the money given to him is counterfeit money: It's pointless to work! Now, the problem is precisely that of getting Dupre to understand the need forthis money. One day he is forced to work, but...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.154) Then there is the tactic of setting to work. Work is highly overdeterminedin the asylum system since, on the one hand, it ensures thenecessary order, discipline, regularity, and constant occupation. Thus,very quickly, around the 1830s, work becomes obligatory withmasylums. The Sainte-Anne farm was initially an extension of the Bicetrehospital before taking over from it.39 As Girard de Cailleux said whenhe was the director of the Auxerre hospital: "peeling and preparing vegetables is frequently a highly beneficial occupation in treatment.", 0 Theinteresting thing about this is that this work is not just imposed becauseit is a lactor in order, discipline, and...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.156) Finally, the fourth effect of the organization of asylum deprivation is that by learning deprivation, by learning that to make up for this deprivation he must work, concede certain things, submit to discipline, etcetera, the patient will learn that basically the care given him, the cure that one attempts to obtain for him, are not owed to him; he is obliged to get them through the efforts of obedience to work, discipline, and remunerated production; he will pay with his work for the good that society does him. As Belloc said: " . . . lf society gives the insane the care they need, the latter must relieve...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.213) In other words, it is not so as to provide children with schools, or because of a failure to provide them with schools, that the problem arises of where to put them. The problem of where to put them does not arise in terms of their schooling, of their ability or inability to be educated at school, but in terms of their parents* work.That is to say: what can be done so that the care needed by an idiot child does not make him an obstacle to working parents? What's more, this exactly corresponds to the government's concern at the time that the lawon primary education...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.214) The institutional assimilation of idiots and the mad takes place precisely on the basis of this concern to release parents for possible work.
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.49) Now a completely new type of institution appears in the second halfof the seventeenth century. As an example of this, I will take theGobelins' professional school of design and tapestry, which was organizedin 1667 and gradually improved up until an important regulationof 1737.9 Apprenticeship takes place here in a completely different way.That is to say, the students are first of all divided up according to age,and a certain type of work is given to each age block. This work must bedone in the presence either of teachers or supervisors, and it must beassessed at the same time and together with...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.51) Here again, we could take an example of this from work discipline, from discipline in the workshop. In workers' contracts which were signed, and this was sometimes the case very early on, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the worker typically had to end his work before a given time, or he had to give so many days work to his patron. It he did not finish the work or provide the full number of days, then he had to give either the equivalent of what was lacking, or add on a certain quantity of work or money as amends. So there was, if you like,...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.65) In the Middle Ages, and much more onthe eve of the Reformation, we see the constitution of relatively egalitariancommunal groups which are not governed by the apparatus of sovereigntybut by the apparatus of discipline: a single rule imposed oneveryone in the same way, there being no differences between those onwhom it is applied other than those indicated by the internal hierarchyof the apparatus. Thus, very early on you see the appearance of phenomenalike the mendicant monks, who already represent a kind ofsocial opposition through a new disciplinary schema. You also see religiouscommunities constituted by the laity, like the Brethren of...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.70) Then, at the end of the seventeenth century, and during the eighteenth century, disciplinary apparatuses appear and are established which no longer have a religious basis, which are the transformation of this, but out in the open as it were, without any regular support From the religious side. You see the appearance of disciplinary systems. There is, of course, the army, with quartering to start with, which dates from the second hall of the eighteenth century, the struggle against deserters, that is to say, the use of files and all the techniques of individual identification to prevent people from leaving the army as they entered it, and, finally, in...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.72) Finally, to make possible the accumulation not only of these forces,but equally of time: the time of work, of apprenticeship, of improvement,of the acquisition of knowledge and aptitudes. This is the third aspect ofthe problem posed by the accumulation of men.This triple function, this triple aspect of the techniques of the accu -mulation of men and of the forces of work, is, I think, the reason why thedifferent disciplinary apparatuses were deployed, tried out, developed,and refined. The extension, movement, and migration of the disciplinesfrom their lateral function to the central and general iunction theyexercise from the eighteenth century are linked...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.73) Okay, again very schematically, I think we could say that what gavebirth to the sciences of man was precisely the irruption, the presence, orthe insistence of these tactical problems posed by the need to distributethe forces of work in terms of the needs of the economy that was thendeveloping. Distributing men in terms of these needs no longer entailedtaxonomy, but a tactic, and the name of this tactic is "discipline." Thedisciplines are techniques for the distribution of bodies, individuals,time, and forces of work. It was these disciplines, with precisely thesetactics with the temporal vector they entail, which burst into Westernknowledge...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.75) This means that in a system like this we are never dealing with amass, with a group, or even, to tell the truth, with a multiplicity: we areonly ever dealing with individuals. Even il a collective order is giventhrough a megaphone, addressed to everyone at the same time andobeyed by everyone at the same time, the (act remains that this collective order is only ever addressed to individuals and is only ever receivedby individuals placed alongside each other. All collective phenomena,all the phenomena of multiplicities, are thus completely abolished. And,as Bentham says with satisfaction, in schools there will no longer...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.79) It seems to me that the panoptic mechanism provides the common thread to whatcould be called the power exercised on man as a force of work andknowledge of man as an individual.
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.80) I do not think it is true that the family served as the model for the asylum, school, barracks, or workshop. Actually, it seems to me that nothing in the way the family functions enables us to see any continuitybetween the family and the institutions, the disciplinary apparatuses, I am talking about.
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.81) What meaning would the obligation to work have if individuals were not first of all held within the family's system of sovereignty, within this system of commitmentsand obligations, which means that things like help to other members of the family and the obligation to provide them with food are taken for granted? Fixation on the disciplinary system of work is only achievedinsofar as the sovereignty of the family plays a full role. The first role ofthe family with regard to disciplinary apparatuses (appareils), therefore, is this kind of pinning of individuals to the disciplinary apparatus (appareil).
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
      (p.83) At the time when, in the nineteenth century, the European proletariat was being formed, conditions of workand housing, movements of the labor force, and the use of child labor, all made family relationships increasingly fragile and disabled the family structure. In lact, at the beginning ol the nineteenth century, entirebands of children, young people, and transhumant workers were living in dormitories and forming communities, which then immediately disintegrated. There was an increasing number of natural children,foundlings, and infanticides, etcetera. Faced with this immediate consequenceof the constitution of the proletariat, very early on, around1820-1825, there was a major effort to reconstitute the family; employers,philanthropists, and public...
    • Psychiatric power: Lectures at the college de france, 1973--1974 (2008)
    • Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981 (2017)
      (p.126) On the basis of this general theory of the ends of marriage, Xenophon, through the speech he gives to Ischomachus, defines the responsibility of the two sexes in this house, this community, thishousehold that they form. For the man, in particular, it is a matter of working outside, in the fields, in the properties, concerning himself with life with his fellow citizens.9 And then, for the woman, it will bea matter—her body is formed for this—of feeding the children and staying at home to mind the provisions.10 The text ends with a completely classical comparison with the bee hive.11 Humankind is like a bee hivewhere each...
    • Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981 (2017)
      (p.135) Aristotle says that the relationship of philia between man and wife is intense, strong, and inclines the man towards the woman and woman to the man [much] more than relationships of comradeship or shared citizenship. And he explains why this relationship between man and woman is particularly intense, more intense than political relationships. If this relationship is so strong, he says, it is first of all because it is useful, because man and wife can continuously provide mutual assistance, that they can divideup the work of the household between them. From this utility in the distribution of work, this mutual assistance, comes a pleasure that is due to the...
    • Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981 (2017)
      (p.216) And how will Pliny console himself in this tormenting experience of desire? Well, he says, I can console myself only by going to the forum, by pleading, and by continuing my judicial and political activities. Imagine, he says ending his letter, what my life is when I have to seek rest in work (requies in labore) and comfort in cares.26 This idea that he will seek consolation in work and the cares of public life is interesting because one sees then that this letter, so with all the analysis of desiderium, of torture, and so on,* is exactly the opposite life, the reverse of the now established image...
    • Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981 (2017)
      (p.41) What about religious consciousness, what is the status of our religious consciousness, in what respect can this religious consciousness effectively account for what we are? Feuerbach represented exactly the summit of thisform of analysis focused on these categories of Judeo-Christianity and paganism,13 and then the evolution takes place in exactly the opposite direction to that of the French. That is to say, through Marx and acertain number of others in German socialism, it is the economic categories, notably those of capitalism, that finally prevailed in this selfanalysis of the West. And that is why it may be thought that, at theend of the nineteenth century, the greatest...
    • Subjectivity and Truth: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1980-1981 (2017)
  • Lotringer, Sylvère; Hochroth, Lysa; Johnston, John
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