The force of a political entity has often been divided into two main categories: soft power and hard power, each with their own relationship to the body. Hard power is brutal force, what the Taylor reading talks about as torture or what Foucault speaks about when he refers to the public execution. Soft power is along the lines of persuation and ideology, and is the careful crafting of the subject as a particular actor by the particular forces. Each reading focuses on the intersections and complications between these two types of power. Taylor discusses both the violence inflicted as well as the willing “percepticide” of the general populous in response. Harkening back to Arendt’s ethics of visibility, the populous upon seeing that one of their own has been maimed can simply go on as if they haven’t seen or experienced this, so their happens to be a failed uptake (to use Austin’s term) of the act in the mind of the viewer. “Perhaps the fact that we know what is going on and yet cannot see it makes the entire process more frightening, riveting, and resistant to eradication” (Taylor 132). The result of this failed uptake, the inability for the sight to cause change, is part of a larger fallacy that “the public, local as well as international, can miraculously avert violence by watching it” (134). The hard power of violence then shifts to the soft power of persuation, but always backed by the potentiality for escalation. This is emphasized in Foucault as he outlines in his history of the prison. Opting to go away from the spectacle of the public execution, Western societies move toward a prison system that gets not only at the body but at the soul- pathologizing and moralizing the inner part of a person’s being. By transcending the body itself, but always with the shadow of violence lurking behind, one is able to start corrective force instead of punitive force. The body, to Foucault, holds a kind of knowledge, what he calls the ‘political technology of body.’ These actions of the body, part of a larger scheme of normative rules, constitute ourselves and thus are able to be more effective at subduing the population. Then, the power is spread out among all of us and not centralized in an easily toppled governmental hierarchy. We are all the wardens policing each other based on norms, alluding to Girad’s conception of persecution as a uniquely social crisis where the general population are all “potential persecutors, for they dream of purging the community of the impure elements that corrupt it, the traitors who undermine it” (16). The body then is a vehicle for politics in a particular way. Subject-hood becomes constituted by systems but also a sight of resistance and a moment to create new systems, as within Girad’s and Foucault’s theories is the assumption that there is power within the individual. I am particularly interested in the ways that we can harness that power to create new political realities.