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1. The Dismembered Body
"The human body was entering a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down, and rearranges it."Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish
On March 2, 1757, Robert-François Damiens, who attempted to kill King Louis XV with a penknife, was condemned as a regicide "to make the amende honorable before the main door of the Church of Paris," where he was to be "taken and conveyed in a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax." Then, "the flesh will be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves with red-hot pincers . . . and, on those places where the flesh will be torn away, poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur melted together and then his body drawn and quartered by four horses" (qtd. in Foucault 1975a, 3).1
But the horses did not succeed in pulling Damiens apart:
Finally, the executioner, Samson, said to Monsieur Le Breton that there was no way or hope of succeeding, and told him to ask their Lordships if they wished him to have the prisoner cut into pieces. . . .
After two or three attempts, the executioner Samson and he who had used the pincers each drew out a knife from his pocket and cut the thighs where the trunk of the body ends instead of severing the legs at the joints; the four horses . . . carried off the two thighs after them, namely, that of the right side first, the other following; then the same was done to the arms, the shoulders, the arm-pits and the four limbs; the flesh had to be cut almost to the bone. . . .
One of the executioners . . . said shortly afterwards that when they had lifted the trunk to throw it on the stake, he was still alive.2 (4-5)
Readers will have recognized in these passages the surgically precise description of Damiens's torture that forms the opening of Discipline and Punish (1975a), the best-known book by Michel Foucault, in which he aims to describe and denounce "the disciplinary society." But here is the description of another victim of torture:
After hunting for an hour, they found a stray cat small enough to ride...