Michel Fokine

“In the year 1866 the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon.” This is the first line of Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I chose to read this novel because my grandfather spoke highly of it. He’d wanted me to read it for a while, so I downloaded the audiobook. I never got around to listening to it until I got this project. It seemed like a perfect opportunity to get it read. 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea is a…

Foucault discusses many concepts in the first volume of his book; The History of Sexuality. According to Foucault, there are four rules of which power deploys in terms of sexuality; the one I will discuss is Tactical Polyvalence. I will explain what this rule means, as well as how it applies to everyday life. The final rule of the deployment of power, tactical polyvalence, is a challenging term to understand. First, to break down the rule itself, I will define the term word by word. Tactical is…

As I began watching the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I started to assume that the movie would be played out as a typical love storyline. However, that all changed as the “love” story turned into a dramatic element. The writer of this movie set Joel (Jim Carrey) and Clementine (Kate Winslet), two individuals that dated in the past, to reconnect not knowing of their previous affairs. In this twist of a story, Charlie Kaufman cultivated this movie with reoccurring themes, which…

Gambling, political dissidence, and economy may not seem to have much in common at first, but all have a key goal of “beating the system”. Michel Foucault presents a method of discipline that attempts to destroy an individual’s likelihood of going against government rulings: panopticism. Panopticism advocates the idea that a prisoner or subject potentially under constant scrutiny will not misbehave under observation. In William Shakespeare’s Othello, Othello is under constant scrutiny. Likewise,…

Unit 5 Assignment/Question 2 French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose primary field of inquiry was that of power systems working to control and monitor individuals, was massively interested in the process of punishment and how it evolved over time on the basis of power play in the society. This essay seeks to explore Foucault’s examination of the history of punishment, the changes that the penal system went through, the advantages and disadvantages that came with these changes and how…

Starting at the precise moment of one’s birth, our bodies become part of a society founded and maintain by a scheme of docile bodies. Mainly focused in the control of the human body, the structure emphasizes in turning the body into an obedient machine that will serve the necessities of a given civilization. Philosopher Michael Foucault describes this scheme, composed by three main techniques: “the scale of the control, the object of the control and the modality”(Foucault, pp. 331-332). Although…

Michel Foucault’s Panoptisicm lays out the design of a prison to convey absolute authority. Foucault writes, “He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication” (Foucault, 200). Foucault employs this design…

Michael Foucault believes that modern society is a society of surveillance, and his predictions could not be more accurate. Through the intention of producing something as lighthearted as entertainment, we have relied on the panoptic order to secure this gaze. This essay will use Foucault’s theory of the ‘panoptic’ order to discuss the ways the, ‘Funniest Security Camera Moments of All Time’ from America’s Funniest Home Videos uses found footage comedies to define our modern day visual culture.…

Foucault Vs Durkheim: A Comparison Between Deviation In Of Madness Itself: Histoire de la Folie and the Object of Psychiatric History, Nikolas Rose provides an analysis of Histoire de la Folie by Michel Foucault. In Rose’s article, he poses the question, “What is specific to madness itself?” (1987, p. 142). Rather than having a specific definition or characterization of ‘madness,’ the term is in relation to the constitutions of society (Rose 1987, p. 143). The idea of ‘madness’ is…

Michel Foucault wrote The History of Sexuality , which is a three volume analysis of sexuality in the western world. Foucault balanced this archaeological approach with a genealogical approach that he borrowed from Nietzsche. In the first volume, Foucault explorers the “repressive hypothesis” in which he says that the history of sexuality over the past three hundred years or so has been a history of repression. Repression is a manner in which a person is barred from expressing his or her…