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List Price: $14.95 |
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Customer Ratings: 4.0 (from 43 reviews) |
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Reviews |
Product Description
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul. |
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| Product Details |
| Author: |
Michel Foucault |
| Binding: |
Paperback |
| Dewey Decimal Number: |
365.643 |
| EAN: |
9780679752554 |
| ISBN: |
0679752552 |
| Label: |
Vintage |
| Languages: |
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| List Price: |
| Amount: |
1495 |
| Currency Code: |
USD |
| Formatted Price: |
$14.95 |
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| Manufacturer: |
Vintage |
| Number Of Items: |
1 |
| Number Of Pages: |
352 |
| Package Dimensions: |
| Height: |
79 |
| Length: |
795 |
| Weight: |
57 |
| Width: |
520 |
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| Product Group: |
Book |
| Publication Date: |
1995-04-25 |
| Publisher: |
Vintage |
| Release Date: |
1995-04-25 |
| Studio: |
Vintage |
| Title: |
Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison |
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| Customer Reviews |
Customer Rating: 4
Review Date: 2009-06-30
0 out of 0 found this review helpful.
Summary: Expert Analysis
Just as my title says, this book gives expert analysis on the topic of how disciplines make us into docile bodies and therefore, easier to control. Dont let the title fool you, this book, while it does deal with some of the history of criminology, it deal much more heavily into disciplines. A must read for the student of social control. The only thing that is missing, which is also a common theme in Foucault's work, are recommendations for what society should do. Its clear that he takes issue with disciplines (although, dont fool yourself into thinking that he thinks all disciplines are bad) but he offers no way to get out of them. An untrained Foucault reader might think that he prefers the barbaric public torture to modern punishment and this is its weakness. |
Customer Rating: 4
Review Date: 2009-03-05
0 out of 0 found this review helpful.
Summary: No Index!
This edition of the book has no index! Quite a frustration when trying to use it for academic writing. |
Customer Rating: 2
Review Date: 2009-03-01
1 out of 3 found this review helpful.
Summary: OK, but pretentious like his other work
A few chapters are interesting because they bring back the gruesome spectacle of publc torture. So, if you're a sadist, and to some extent we all are (by watching horror flicks like Saw, etc.), you will dig how he introduces his power-knowledge theme and applies it to punishment today and yesterday.
His writing itself is filled with run-on sentences, albeit with the overused semicolons and colons. And his paragraphs are too long. Did he skip language/writing classes? Foucault's terms are seldom defined adequately, if at all, and he is hard to follow. It's hard to see how this gives any value to his books. It takes a lot away in my opinion, perhaps masking the bleakness of some of his work. |
Customer Rating: 1
Review Date: 2009-02-09
2 out of 8 found this review helpful.
Summary: In itself, a punishment of sorts
Contemporary, left of center writing begins every social criticism (for the purposes of the left, the individual is immaterial, if not downright anathema) with a premise strikingly biblical: before the serpent, always bourgeois and rational, there was eden. Foucault refers to the world before reason came slithering in as a place without madness (cf. History of Madness) and a place without crime (this work). After seducing the good to think their innocent acts a sin, and those who perpetrate them naked and wicked, yea, then did the commercial devils Work and Industry clothe our bodies in cover-alls and deliver us over into a toiling hell, where there are toilets, moon rockets, and day schools. for foucault, madness is an identity assigned to those who will not reason as the devils say one should; and crime is a mere name intended to demean an act of rebellion against the authority of these same devils.
gimme a break! the entire hypothesis is outlandish in the extreme. true, there are brilliancies in Foucault's work, but they more often than not illuminate how banal the method behind it, and therefore resemble the critical equivalent of a slight of hand, put there to conceal the purpose. I would broadly categorize corruption as the maintenance of an untruth for private purposes. Foucault is profoundly guilty of this kind of dishonesty, and it corrupts what value his observation might intrinsically possess.
brains, please, people.
what might cato say today? "methinks, the left (latin for left is sinister: remarkably apropo) ought utterly be destroyed." a good enough beginning for this perdition would be its authors and all their works, mostly for being stupid, and telling such catchable lies.
tlt- |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2008-12-20
1 out of 1 found this review helpful.
Summary: Michel Foucault is Unbelievable. Talk about Mind-Expansion.
A short review:
This is an exceptional book by a man who is loved in the academic world. Foucault has changed the way I see everything. This book is definitely one of my top ten reads.
Additional Thoughts:
This book was my introduction to Foucault and, within the awesomeness of the torture scene described in the beginning of the book, I was and remain hooked. You will be blown away by this man's capacity to understand the minutest details of life and apply them to the "larger picture"--which in this case is our current prison system. In other words, I remain confident, that Foucault could connect a little boy bouncing a ball in the middle of a shopping mall, to the gaze of a guard peering at the inmates, aware of their every move, their every word, and seemingly, their every thought.
In this book, Foucault uses Nietzsche's genealogical method to understand the "birth" of the prison, not the "origin". He tries to identify the historical and sociological forces that went into the birthing of the prison system, which (you soon learn) went hand-in-hand with the developing systems of education, hospitals, and factories. Foucault is not a localist, he is a totalist. He does not believe the current prison system stemmed from previous systems, but that the current system is intimately involved in the changes in every other aspect of human life.
What this all adds up to is a terrific read for anyone interested in understanding much of today's contemporary life: our obsession with time and orderliness (How our increments of time continually get smaller and smaller, Why our (talking to Americans here mostly) big named stores all look alike) and our deeply held obsession for violence; among many other things.
Suggestions for reading:
Foucault's ideas, as a philosopher, are known to be complex and provocative. Don't worry. This book is meant for the casual reader. Of his ideas in this book, you are introduced to his idea of power, which he more explicitly writes about in his more academic essays. For the casual reader (which sadly I am sure there will not be too many of you), I suggest to read this book keeping this "power" in mind. If you do this, you are on your way to a mind-bending experience, for you will begin to see power, domination and subjugation in a completely different light. For these all become relative concepts in the totalizing unit Foucault calls "power". Read to understand. |
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