If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the… — Michel Foucault
If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.
p. 55Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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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.
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
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
