I was confused today as to what exactly Foucault means by the individual. It seems to me that the individual must be the soul that Durkheim speaks of. Foucault focuses on how the body can be trained. This gives the body a value of utility. However, the soul or the mind of the person is what separates one person from another, and this soul can be the only thing that forces the body to be disciplined. It would then make sense that the individual is the soul of the person since it is the part of the human in charge of decision making.
One thing that I noticed is that Foucault does not seem to refer to any person outside of society. For him, the individual is dependent on a larger social construct. What about the person outside of any social construct? We talked in class about how the individual is in contradiction to the mass for Foucault. It appears to me that the individual outside of the mass or society does not seem to fit this definition. If a person has never experienced society, then he or she can not be evaluated by the same standards. This person has no idea about an social rules and cannot comprehend being a contradiction to the mass when they themselves are the mass or collective society within their world. I would be interested to hear Foucault’s ideas on the hermit who has never lived in society.