The Penal Soul

If the surplus power possessed by the king gives rise to the duplication of his body, has not the surplus power exercised on the subjected body of the condemned man given rise to another type of duplication? That of a 'non-corporeal', a 'soul', as Mably called it. The history of the [works] of the punitive power would then be a genealogy of the modern 'soul'. Rather than seeing this soul as the reactivated remnants of an ideology, one would see it as the present correlative of a certain technology of power over the body. It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is produced permanently around, on, within the body by the functioning of a power that is exercised on those punished - and, in a more general way, on those one supervises, trains and corrects, over madmen, children at home and at school, the colonized, over those who are struck at a machine and observed for the rest of their lives. This is the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.

- Michel Foucault

What does it mean to say that the soul is born of punishment, supervision, and constraint? We might think of the soul as that activity in which a coherent identity gets formed. Often, this has been conceived as coming from within the inner potentiality of a human being, brought out successively through time as one's essence progressively manifests itself. However, the Aristotelian must also grant that any inner potentiality does not possess the power to manifest itself; rather, potency can only be brought into actuality by something already actual.

For the Christian tradition (and even for Aristotle), that actuality that calls the soul out from hidden potentiality and allows it to come into its own is God. God as pure act should not be thought of as one actual thing among others that comes alongside something such as the sole and "activates" it. God's immanence, especially as expressed in the doctrine of the imago Dei, exists "inside" the soul, bringing it to its own natural actuality from within.

Foucault's claim is quite different. The soul does not come from within, but from without. The soul is imposed by the principalities and powers of the world through acts of violence. The soul is that force exercised by power and the technics of repression. And rather than the soul enlivening the body, freeing it from inert materiality, the soul, as the product of the mechanics of power, imprisons the body.