The Docile Body

In Discipline and Punish (1975) Foucault claims that institutions “regulate” the body. Society stands “above” the individual—and imposes its will. Koenigsberg hypothesizes that bodies become docile by virtue of the fact that human beings cannot resist the lure of the sovereign. They want to be “at one” with the body politic. The desire for dependent fusion with an “omnipotent” object generates obedience.

The frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan depicts the head and torso of a long-haired, mustachioed man. Upon close scrutiny, it becomes evident that the man’s torso and arms are composed of tiny individual persons, crowded closely together and each looking toward the head of the composite Leviathan.

Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan.