Synopsis:
- Western societies jail fools, while older societies acknowledged their existence
- Western societies repress the creative force of madness
- Western societies torture the minds of criminals, whereas older societies tortured their bodies: prisons are the chief instrument of social control
- Western societies control individuals by training their minds
- Western societies are vast mechanisms of supervision and repression
- Western society has developed "bio-power"
- Liberal democratic societies are not any less oppressive than totalitarian regimes
- History is not a monodimensional class struggle, but many parallel social conflicts (prisons, asylums, schools...)
- We "know" the world through the theories we believe in
- Epistemes (structures of knowledge) determine our experience in the world (humans are not autonomous sources of knowledge - "man is a recent invention")
- The objects of science exist only insofar as science exists ("there was no life before biology")
- Knowledge and power are identical
- History of sexuality
- Anatomo-politics (the politics of the human body)
- Bio-politics (the politics of human population)
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