ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault claimed that his account of power relied on an intricate methodological scaffolding which he called an “analytics of power.” This chapter describes the other forms of modern power. Discipline and Punish begins, like Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, by describing the execution of Damien the would-be regicide, and that scene for both Foucault and Dickens stands as an emblem of the ultimate means by which feudal and absolutist society organized itself. Imaging itself in clearly demarcated and ceremonial public spaces, sovereign power has a never too deeply hidden capacity to torture and kill. Disciplinary power works in quite strictly delimited spaces, though its pathways and mazes spread across the social totality, unlike sovereign power which is centralized and evaporates at the margins. It is deritualized and privatized, working on individuals as individuals rather than either as members of castes or as markers of a wider cosmic or social order.
