Medea in the Courtroom: Foucault, Alice Diop, and Abolition

Abstract:

Building on Angela Davis' and other Black feminists' critiques of Discipline and Punish, this article reconsiders the important legacy of this book and of the writings of the Prisons Information Group, recently published as Intolerable (1970–1980), through the analysis of Alice Diop's Saint Omer, a 2022 film that imagines an immigrant Medea facing an infanticide conviction in a French courtroom: the symbol of a surveillance system where law and justice participate in racialized or racist oppression. By exploring adjacencies between Discipline and Punish and the "early" Foucault, in particular the essay "The Thought from Outside" in its connections with recent theorizations of Black fugitivity, the article suggests that a re-engagement with Foucault might allow us to test readings that reach beyond the viewers' mere self-awareness of their inescapable collusion with the Prison Industrial Complex. In Saint Omer, Medea seems to embody the fugitivity of a chromatic and affective blueness that stretches the marine environment and aquatic maternal care into the corpus of the movie, the filmic texture, suffusing docu-images with liquid lyricism, which voids the judicial apparatus, reducing it to desolation, an empty signifier.