Uma investigação acerca das punições em Michel Foucault: os mecanismos que justificam a necessidade de punir.

Abstract

The present work aims to weave an investigation about the transformations that undergo the punitive devices between the XVII and XIX centuries and possible reflexes on the actual society. Thus, our approach goes into the many ways of control and manipulation of the individuals in society, having as a constant which works in parallel and fundaments the more diverse transformations of social institutions, the birth and development of capitalism. The matter which pervades and boosts our work is the one of knowing which aspects fundament the permanent need of punition, so that it endures, and reshapes itself, for so many centuries in a strong, effective and definitive way. The analysis that we will outline in our dissertation goes through, defines and situates the main punitive devices presented by Michel Foucault in innumerous writings, conferences and interviews but, primarily, in the course The punitive society (1973), in the cycle of conferences named The truth of juridical forms (1973) and in the work Discipline and Punish: birth of the prison (1975). Devices such as: the rite of torment, the exercise of penitence, the disciplinary power, the time kidnapping, the prison institution and the normalization. Discoursing first about the rite of torment, we observe that, little by little, this extreme method of violence has been put aside by a new model of society that was emerging, the capitalist society. This new economic ideal will, by its own needs of functioning, define an all different social structure which will need live individuals (thus, the death power symbolized by the torment will no longer be needed), so that they can produce but, also, individuals that function in a determined manner. From these new needs, therefore will be created a range of apparatus and control institutions. What this economic model needs is disciplined individual, docile and useful – so that they can be productive. But this system goes beyond, it, by the need of control, wider and more efficient, will also control the sexuality, health, safety, etc. Those who do not adequate themselves to these new social norms will find the old ideal, modeled to this new system – the punition. That way, the panoptic, the discipline, the time kidnapping institutions and the prison take body and punitive power. A new way of ruling dominated by the market, by the economy in a wide way, economy by itself (profit), time and space economy. Therefore, using as the main theoretical basis the thinking of Michel Foucault, besides secondary contributions that speak on the punition subject. Coming at last to the need for punishment as a form of control and discipline and correlated with the current expression of normalization, for this seems to be the key to our research. Since the torment to the more recent, the prison, that who is punished is always the deviant, in other word, the abnormal. All of the justification goes against the division of normal (that fits in) and the abnormal (inadequate, unproductive, deviant, tramp, delinquent, crazy). What is searched – through all of this control, discipline and vigilance apparatus – is the normal, productive and adequate, disciplined individual and that which is punished is defined as abnormal. Finally, the point in which our dissertation culminates and unravels is the concept of normalization.