Inaugural address (1889)
Context: There is no constitutional or legal requirement that the President shall take the oath of office in the presence of the people, but there is so manifest an appropriateness in the public induction to office of the chief executive officer of the nation that from the beginning of the Government the people, to whose service the official oath consecrates the officer, have been called to witness the solemn ceremonial. The oath taken in the presence of the people becomes a mutual covenant. The officer covenants to serve the whole body of the people by a faithful execution of the laws, so that they may be the unfailing defense and security of those who respect and observe them, and that neither wealth, station, nor the power of combinations shall be able to evade their just penalties or to wrest them from a beneficent public purpose to serve the ends of cruelty or selfishness.
“In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.”
Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, pp. 56
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Michel Foucault 128
French philosopher 1926–1984Related quotes
1960, Speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association
Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold
Context: The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted. It restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. The public execution, however hasty and everyday, belongs to a whole series of great rituals in which power is eclipsed and restored (coronation, entry of the king into a conquered city, the submission of rebellious subjects); over and above the crime that has placed the sovereign in contempt, it deploys before all eyes an invincible force. Its aim is not so much to re-establish a balance as to bring into play, as its extreme point, the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength.
“All people live in a fantasy in which they are the main character.”
Source: Kino no Tabi: The Beautiful World
Letter accepting the nomination for governor of New York (October 1882).
Executive Order 9981 (1948)
On portraying different kinds of relationships in her book Emergency Contact in “Interview with Mary H.K. Choi” https://therumpus.net/2018/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-mary-h-k-choi/ in The Rumpus (2018 May 18)
“A contract executed without any part performance.”
R. v. Millis (1844), 16 C1. & Fin. 719; describing marriage.
Vol. III, p. 224
William Lloyd Garrison 1805-1879 (1885)