ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique did not make a great impact on the French intellectual scene of the early 1960s. It is striking that, in Force of Circumstance, Beauvoir allots only one sentence to its reception. Sartre himself continued to maintain a prominent public position as a man of the Left into the 1970s, but the intellectual winds were shifting. ‘Anti-humanism’ was becoming dominant, with structuralism the vogue in the 1960s, post-structualism by the 1970s. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault makes clear his divergences from structuralism and defines as one of his main concerns the way disciplinary practices, exercised over the individual human body, come to shape ‘the modern soul’. Much of the substantive content of Discipline and Punish is a description of the development of what Foucault calls ‘technologies’ of power that operate through a fine-tuned regulation of the body.
