Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault, in “Panopticism,” explains that panopticism it can be very beneficial; however, it would lead to tyranny at the end. Plato talks, in “Allegory of the cave,” about the experience in the point of view of a prisoner chained in dark caves and his experience after that. Brian Doyle, in “Joyas Voladoras,” describes a variety of creatures that have hearts, explains their adaptation and their properties; demonstrates that humankind have a unique type of heart - the locker of all the…

When the plague started to kill thousands, measures were put in place to try and weed out the sick and maintain the majority healthy. This involved quarantining areas and keeping a constant watch for outbreaks. Foucault also discusses Bentham’s Panopticon by explaining that “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…

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,…

Michel Foucault (1926-84) was a great French philosopher, thinker, theorist and a literary critic in the second half of the twentieth century. His theories are largely concerned with the relationship between power and knowledge. He was born in Poitiers in France where his father was a prominent surgeon. Foucault was well versed in French, Latin and Greek. He focussed much on the study of Philosophy and studied deeply Kant, Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche and most importantly, Heidegger and Althusser. He…

Michel Foucault complicates notions of power and sexuality because of his interpretive framework of culture and the different and alternate meanings he assigns to phenomenon. On the other hand, his thinking is innovative in that he debunks former understandings of history and culture and forces us to shift paradigms and stretch our perceptions. In The History of Sexuality, Foucault advances several propositions about power as it relates to sexuality, discourse, and knowledge. In using power…

According to Michel Foucault in his book Discipline and Punish, the Panopticon is a prison designed to establish power and control of one individual over the prisoners through observation. This observation is achieved through the prison’s annular structure, with the prisoners in confined cells facing the center, and the supervisor in a central tower (Foucault 200). The ring-like structure and the central tower allow the supervisor to see all inmates while simultaneously prohibiting them from…

Atwood shows an imaginative attempt to conceive a future where women have lost their autonomy and rights, and where the American government is run by conservative moral and religious ideals. Atwood creates a dystopian story which frames itself through Michel Foucault’s Panopticon. The panoptic establishment relies upon complete visibility, a hierarchical organization of power, and an enclosed space. These three concepts are all prevalent throughout the novel. The lack of privacy is shown through…

In this thesis, queer theory, as conceived by leading scholar Michel Foucault, will serve as the starting point in uncovering the extent in which Whitman’s at the time most scorned poetry employed either outright queer imagery or otherwise latent queer code in order to convey his message of free love as opposed to contempt, an issue most gay men had to face in the nineteenth century (men only, seeing that romantic affairs between women were disregarded as innocuous and platonic). The basis of…

In Michel Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish, he writes of the dramatic increase in military effectiveness as a result of changes in the methods of discipline. These changes “increases the skill of each individual, coordinates these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power, broadens the fronts of attack without reducing their vigour, increases the capacity for resistance” (210). Foucault also states that before these changes, military discipline was merely a device used as a means…

Marxists analytical perspective. Woronov’s (2004, 2009) analysis of the Chinese educational system defines the overt changes in PRC policies towards a more privatized and neoliberal vision of education for young people in China. In this perspective, Foucault defines the “power” of the government to defined on the conduct of governmental activities that illustrate the underlying Marxist view of the capitalist system and the problem of Chinese state in the professionalization of the young people…