The Alienist, by Machado de Assis

By engaging in dialogue with these instigating questions relating to disciplinary biopower, developed by Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality: Will to Know (1976) Marcos Rocha not only deduced, in this book, that disciplinary power, in an immanent way, constituted itself as the new historical site of sovereign power, within modernity, but also that State racism is, or can be, against everyone, since, if the two correctional institutions of disciplinary biopower, the prison and the hospice, just by existing, put us all under suspicion (either we are potential criminals or we are insane), it is because the right of death, of violence, typical of the society of sovereignty, in the disciplinary context, has not ceased to be in force, but has become institutional. Disciplinary-institutional biopower is the new place of sovereignty, this time immanent, secular, everyday, bodily, subjective, in the modernity of bourgeois society. By Luís Eustáquio Soares.