Plague v. Leprosy

Foucault draws an intriguing political contrast between the “rituals of exclusion” that arise with lepers and the “disciplinary confinement” that constituted the response to the plague. Leprosy and its rules of “rejection, of exile-exclusion” produces a “massive, binary division between one set of people and another”; by contrast, the plague“called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power.” Thus, “those sick of the plague were caught up in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement on the one hand; the correct training on the other . . . . The first [the leper] is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile of the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society.”