Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975): Examines the shift from spectacular public punishment to modern disciplinary power, arguing that modern institutions create self-regulating subjects through surveillance and normalization. Introduces the concept of the Panopticon.

The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1976): Challenges the "repressive hypothesis" (the idea that sexuality has primarily been repressed), arguing instead that modern society produced a proliferation of discourses about sex, thereby creating and managing it. Introduces the concepts of biopower and biopolitics.

3.3 Roland Barthes: The Death of the Author & Semiotics

Central Idea: The meaning of a text is not fixed by the author's intention but is created by the reader in the act of reading, within their own cultural context. The text is a multi-layered space of signs, open to diverse interpretations.
Key Contributions & Concepts:
- Semiotics: While rooted in Saussurean structural linguistics (signifier/signified), Barthes extended semiotics to analyze cultural phenomena beyond language. He showed how meaning is constructed through systems of signs (images, gestures, objects, fashion, food) and how these signs operate ideologically within culture.
- Myth: In Mythologies, Barthes analyzes everyday cultural practices and objects (e.g., wrestling, detergents, toys, advertising) as modern "myths" – signs that operate on a second level of signification to naturalize certain ideologies and values. Myths transform history into nature, making culturally specific ideas appear universal, innocent, and self-evident, thus serving bourgeois ideology.
- The Death of the Author: A seminal essay arguing that once a text is written, the author loses control over its meaning. The text becomes a "tissue of quotations," a multi-layered space of signs, and its unity lies not in its origin but in its destination (the reader). The reader becomes the site where the text's multiple meanings converge, leading to the "birth of the reader" at the "death of the author." This liberates the text for diverse and open interpretations.
- Writerly Text (texte scriptible) / Readerly Text (texte lisible): A distinction Barthes makes in S/Z. A readerly text is conventional, easy to consume, linear, and reinforces dominant ideologies, leaving the reader as a passive consumer. A writerly text is challenging, ambiguous, discontinuous, and invites the reader to actively participate in producing its meaning, thus undermining authorial authority and opening up infinite interpretations.
Key Works:
- Mythologies (1957): A collection of essays analyzing various cultural phenomena as modern "myths," revealing their ideological underpinnings and how they function to naturalize bourgeois values.
- "The Death of the Author" (1967): Influential essay declaring the author's voice secondary to the reader's interpretation in creating meaning, shifting focus from a text's origin to its reception.
- S/Z (1970): A detailed structural and post-structural analysis of a Balzac novella ("Sarrasine"), demonstrating the polysemic nature of texts and the active role of the reader in creating meaning. It extensively applies the readerly/writerly distinction.
- Image, Music, Text (1977): A collection of essays including "The Death of the Author" and "From Work to Text," further developing semiotic and post-structuralist ideas about textual production and reception.

3.4 Jean Baudrillard: Simulacra & Hyperreality

Central Idea: In contem