The Notion of Justice: A Foucauldian Analysis of Power and Punishment in The Divine Comedy

Abstract This paper draws on Michel Foucault’s theories of power and punishment, as articulated in Discipline and Punish (1975), to study Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. Dante’s vision of justice—one that traverses Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise—is bound up with medieval cosmological hierarchies, in which the order of the world and the relation between human souls and divine authority determine human fate. Through an analysis of the contrapasso—punishments that reflect the nature of the sinner’s crime—the study investigates the relationship between Dante’s vision of divine justice and Foucauldian modes of power, such as the spectacle of punishment, discipline, and normalization. This study fills key gaps in the literature, including the influential reading of an integrated Foucauldian analysis across Dante’s tripartite structure, and the too-often-ignored interplay between spectacle and normalization in producing and normalizing divine justice. This analysis is intended to provide a nuanced understanding of the way in which The Divine Comedy encapsulates Foucauldian systems of power and control, and thereby enhances its significance in terms of discourses on power, hierarchy, and morality. The conclusions add to wider discussions surrounding the intersections between medieval theology, disciplinary mechanisms, and the use of Foucauldian theory in literary studies.