Ruas, torres e masmorras: rumo a uma ciência política da polícia em Michel Foucault

Abstract

This dissertation examines Michel Foucault's conceptions of power and policing, tracing his early formulations on disciplinary power to later developments in biopower and governmentality. The study highlights the ruptures and continuities in Foucault’s thought, exploring how notions of domination and resistance intertwine with the function of police in modern societies. Initially, it analyzes disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish, emphasizing its techniques of surveillance, normalization, and individualization, which produce docile bodies in institutions such as prisons, schools, and factories. Foucault redefines power not as property but as a continuous exercise, operating through a microphysics that subverts traditional juridical-sovereign conceptions. The second chapter discusses the evolution of the police figure in Foucault’s work, from its 17th-century role as a mechanism of population control and the management of infrapenalty to its function as a disseminator of discipline, connecting institutional spaces and intervening in non-disciplinary ones. Thus, the police emerges as an ambiguous institution, both administrative and repressive. The final chapter analyzes biopower and governmentality, demonstrating how power comes to manage the life of populations, regulating phenomena such as birth and mortality rates. In this context, the police reappears as a technology for the management of life, contributing to the development of statistics and governmental practices. Ultimately, what will administer and manage conflict in all these relations—between power-knowledge, between bodies, and between governments—will be the police, which permeates them all.