La semantica della reclusione. Discorsi incorporati di autorità tra ortoprassi religiosa e “ortopedia sociale”

Starting from a preliminary reflection on spaces of confinement as panoptic structures of detention, according to the theoretical model analyzed by Michel Foucault, this introductory essay focuses on one of the first attestations, at the time and in the cultural climate of Ptolemaic Egypt, of a form of sacred confinement (= a highly distinctive form of divine servitude) known as κατοχή, attested at the Serapeum of Memphis by a group of papyri known as the “Archive of the Sons of Glaukias”. The aim of this essay is to investigate more or less similar forms of embodied discourses of authority, articulated around the concepts of discipline, authority, confinement, and vision, with the related reflection on ‘possession’ (by the god) and the ‘taking of possession’ (by the state institution) that characterize states of reclusion, voluntary or involuntary, fulfilled through isolation, seclusion, and separation from forms of normal or secular social life.