• Why do you think Foucault begins Discipline and Punish with a graphic and detailed description of the 1757 torture and execution of Robert-Francois Damiens?  How does this introduction relate to his overall argument in the book?  Why is it followed up with a list of the nineteenth-century rules for Paris prisoners drawn up by Leon Faucher?

• How does Foucault dissect the public and theatrical punishments of the Ancien Regime?  What does he say about their purpose?  What was the role of the audience in the spectacle of the scaffold?

•  How does Foucault distinguish between the system of the Ancien Regime and the modern system?  To what extent does Foucault distinguish between punishment and discipline?

• Draw up a chart in which you match up practices, events, institutions, people, meanings, emphases and other things that Foucault links to the Ancien Regime with corresponding categories that he associates with modern society?

•  How does Foucault account for the emergence of the modern prison?  What role does the prison play in Foucault’s interpretation of historical change?

•  What was the Panopticon and what role does it play in Foucault’s account?  Discuss the concept of the gaze in Discipline and Punish.  To what extent is the modern prison a Panopticon?

• What does Foucault seem to suggest that prisons are for?  To what extent does Foucault define the prison as the emblematic institution of modern times?  How would you respond here?  How would you begin to make sense of his project overall?  What is he trying to do in examining prisons?

• How similar and how different is the prison in comparison to the factory, the hospital, the asylum and the school? 

• How does Foucault integrate both the church and the military into his analysis?

•  What role does the body and its history play in Foucault’s account?  How does the relationship between power and the body change between the old and new forms of discipline and punishment?

•  What does Foucault have to say about normalcy and deviancy, and how would you respond to his claims?

• Is Jeremy Bentham the prophet of the modern age?  How do you respond to Foucault’s suggestion that the doctor, the psychiatrist, the social worker and the teacher are engaged in a continual process of surveillance and examination that helps to impose the carceral state?

•  What comments would you make about the structure of the book and its division into four sections: 1) Torture, 2) Punishment, 3) Discipline, 4) Prison.  How is this structure connected to his arguments?

•  Where would you place Foucault on the political spectrum?  Would you classify as a political activist?  What role does resistance place in Foucault’s system?

•  What do you know of Foucault’s biography and how might this background have influenced his ideas?

•  What, in your own opinion, are the strength and weaknesses of Discipline and Punish?

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