# Quote — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

> A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus.

- Author: [Michel Foucault](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault.md)
- Book: [Discipline and Punish](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish.md)
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Michel_Foucault#Discipline_and_Punish_(1977)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/a-great-prison

## More from this book

> The perfect disciplinary apparatus would make it possible for a single haze to see everything constantly. A central point would be both the source of light illuminating everything, and a locus of convergence for everything that must be known: a perfect eye that nothing would escape and a centre towards which all gazes would be turned.

[Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/the-perfect-disciplinary.md)

> It was an important moment. The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came of the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.

p. 17 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/it-was-an-important.md)

> This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.

p. 80 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/michel-foucault/discipline-and-punish/this-dysfunction-of-power.md)