ABSTRACT
I begin this engagement with Foucault by reworking his most famous title, that is, Discipline and Punish.1 What if we write “Discipline and Freedom” rather than “Discipline and Punish”? To sharpen the question, what if we take something like the retributivist line about punishment and say that punishment is warranted only in regard to those of my actions that are an at least partially successful resistance to the attempts of others to direct, control, or constrain me? Punishment can be jurally warranted only where there is criminality or delinquency (nulla poena sine lege and nulla poena sine crimen), that is, only when controlling or disciplining conventions, rules, or directives are in place. But the mere fact that authoritative norms or commands have been established is only a necessary not a sufficient condition of those further forms of disciplining that are the infliction or attempted infliction of punishments. The latter are warranted if and only if I have succeeded in at least partially resisting the first form of disciplining, that is, if I have succeeded in acting in a fashion that contravenes the established or authoritative norms. On this view, perhaps encouraged by Foucault’s various discussions of “local resistance” and more generally of the ways in which the attempts of others to discipline me often incite resistance on my part, disciplinary archipelagos or carcereal societies are at once the dearest friends and the most implacable enemies of freedom.2
