Oversee and punish. The birth of a prison

More than 250 years ago, Robert Fransua Damien, who attacked the life of King Louis XV, was quarterly on Grevskaya Square in Paris. With a description of his monstrous execution, it begins to “oversee and punish” - one of the most revolutionary books on the modern theory of society. The bloody performance of the execution allows Foucault to demonstrate the differences between the individual violence and the violence of the state and show how the main object of state control is not the body, but the soul of the criminal. The evolution of the methods of supervision and punishment gradually turns rude state violence into a complex mechanism of total biofilament, enveloping modern man in his daily life and forming a society of total control.
Analysis of the political seizure of the body and microphysics of the authorities implies a refusal - with regard to the authorities - from the opposition "violence - ideology", from the metaphor of property, from the model of the contract or conquest, and refusal - with regard to knowledge, - From the opposition between the "interested" and "disinterested", "selfish" and "disinterested", from the model of knowledge, in which the subject plays the main role. If we borrow the word from Petty and his contemporaries, but give him a different meaning than in the 17th century, one can imagine a political "anatomy". It would not be a study of the state as a "body" (with its elements, resources and forces), nor a study of the body and its environment as a small state. It would be a study of the "political body" as a combination of material elements and techniques that serve as weapons, means of transmission, communication channels and points of support for relations of power and knowledge that capture and subordinate human bodies, turning them into objects of cognition