# Quote — Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

> But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement ... There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has not been entirely overcome, but which is enveloped, increasingly, by the non-corporal nature of the penal system

- 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/but-a-punishment

## 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)