ABSTRACT
On appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The plague as form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. If it is true that leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent provided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. In order to make rights and laws function according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague.
