Abstract

In that laboratory of Discipline and Punish which are the courses at the Collège de France of 1972 and 1973, Michel Foucault sketched out the idea of the so called fracture between the “penalµ and the “penitentiaryµ that had occurred towards the end of the eighteenth century. Such an event led to various consequences, one of which is the discovery of what Foucault defines the field of “para-legalµ as a space of normativity that is parallel to formal law. This discovery, which today seems to be taken for granted, had a considerable heuristic and critical significance at the time. Instead of being a self-referential sphere for jurists, legal order appeared just a planet belonging to a heterogeneous galaxy of social regulatory techniques.