La imposible genealogía de lo social: La sociedad punitiva y las aporías del accionar estratégico

Abstract

Forty years after Discipline and Punish, The Punitive Society shows that Foucault wanted to use the concept of discipline to put forward a genealogy of sociology and, especially, of the Durkheimian program. By rejecting a conception of the right as an expression of demands that were immanent in the collective consciousness, this author conceives the moralization of the penalty as a strategy developed during the 19th century by a bourgeoisie concerned in protecting itself against the new illegalism caused by the transformations of capitalist property. In taking as unifying thread the confrontation with the sociological evolutionism that it is found at the basis of the history of penalty  reconstructed by Foucault, this article tries to show the benefits that can be obtained by using the archeological method of dissolution of historical continuities. At the same time, it tries too to show the apories to which genealogy is faced when it tries to give an account of the formation of modern political subjects, not from the forms of solidarity, but from the principle of a civil war that is underneath society.