Questions

Foucault mentions that "pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement." I agree with that statement, and wonder whether the relationship between power and pain is the same? The reading on punishment suggests that modern punitive practices wished to distance the relationship between power and pain--at least superficially. its seems that there was a redefinition of pain, and a more complex understanding of power that, similar to the proliferation of sources in sexuality the distribution of power/pain allowed a discourse that incorporated a self knowledge? This is a stretch I realize, but I think it is interesting to think Foucault's description of knowledge/power relationship and power/pain/pleasure relationship and the possible pain/pleasure/knowledge extrapolation that could follow that line of argument.