Goldstein, Jan. Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. 411.

Whether supremely logical or an accident of history, the coexistence of law and discipline cannot be supposed to proceed smoothly. Foucault assumed the existence of a perennial conflict – or at least a persistent low-grade friction – between those two modes of power whose collaboration was so essential to the viability of the modern state. He insisted that discipline was more than just an “infra-law” – more, than is, than a mode of training that extends the demands of the law to the “infinitesimal level of the individual lives,” thus supplying the element of bodily compliance absent from the liberal constitutional state. Even while functioning as the loyal handmaiden of law, discipline also qualified as a “counter-law.” As Foucault put it, “in the space and during the time in which they exercise their control and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, [the disciplines] effect a suspension of the law that is never total but never annulled either.” But what were the practical consequences of the friction between law and discipline? Which side characteristically won, and with what implications for human freedom?