Foucault knows how to start a book.

As with the description of the Ship of Fools for Madness and Civilization, and the analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas for The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish begins with the execution of Damien the regicide, who attempted to assassinate Louis XV of France, as the torture and revenge of the sovereign power over the man’s body par excellence. With this opening scene, Foucault manages to simultaneously repulse and captivate the reader. He then briefly describes the changes, the ‘progress’ of the penal reforms throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, towards a non-corporal penality, with two processes of the disappearance of violent execution as a spectacle, and the elimination of pain inflicted on the convicts.

Is this seemingly humane progress the result of the advancement on morality and human sciences as our civilization tends to attribute? Not at all, says Foucault. Despite the calls to “Save the souls” of the convicts from the reformers, there are deeper factors at play. Discipline and Punish, as a history of the modern penal system, is a genealogy of the soul and body in the political, judicial and scientific fields, particularly in relation to punishment, and above all to power over and within the body, to render the body docile and useful, and not specifically in the penitentiary, but also in the other institutions such as the school, the workshop and the hospital from whose knowledge of and technology to control and discipline individuals it combines and develops. Hence, in short, prisons become major industries of power over and knowledge of men.

Power and Historicity – Foucault in a nutshell.