This post from the Foucault News blog provides an interesting supplement to my recent blogging on Foucault’s Collège de France lectures on the punitive society, from Graham Burchell, who is translating these lectures and has translated many others.
Michel Foucault, La société punitive: an editorial curiosity
by Graham Burchell, 2014
Graham Burchell is the translator into English of the lectures Foucault delivered at the Collège de France. With thanks to Graham Burchell for sending this note to Foucault News.
Translating Foucault’s Collège de France lectures, La société punitive, I have come across the following curiosity, which, unless I am mistaken, no one has commented on before now. In the “Résumé du cours”, p. 261, discussing the model of talion (lex talionis, an eye for an eye), Foucault remarks that this model was never proposed in a detailed way, but that it did enable different types of punishment to be defined. He then gives, apparently, two examples from Beccaria’s Dei delitti e delle pene. The first is: “Les attentats contre les personnes doivent être punis de peines corporelles (the penalty for violence against…
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