Michel Foucault Quotes
-
The way people really think is not adequately analyzed by the universal categories of logic. Between social history and formal analyses of thought there is a path, a lane - maybe very narrow - which is the path of the historian of thought.
→ -
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.
→ -
It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
→ -
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
→ -
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge
→ -
Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau's influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: 'Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot.
→ -
Probably it's insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other.
→ -
To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories.
→ -
Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
→ -
I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
→ -
The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
→ -
To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before
→ -
The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
→ -
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
→ -
What I seek is a permanent opening of possibilities.
→ -
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
→ -
If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.
→ -
You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.
→ -
Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.
→ -
I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.
→ -
The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
→ -
Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.
→ -
Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.
→ -
There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations
→ -
If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
→ -
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
→ -
Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin.
→ -
I wasn't always smart, I was actually very stupid in school [T]here was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him – and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.
→ -
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
→ -
Because they claim to be concerned with the welfare of whole societies, governments arrogate to themselves the right to pass off as mere abstract profit or loss the human unhappiness that their decisions provoke or their negligence permits. It is a duty of an international citizenship to always bring the testimony of people's suffering to the eyes and ears of governments, sufferings for which it's untrue that they are not responsible. The suffering of men must never be a mere silent residue of policy. It grounds an absolute right to stand up and speak to those who hold power.
→
Related Authors
-
Pierre Bourdieu Sociologist -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
Sigmund Freud Neurologist -
Judith Butler Philosopher -
Antonio Gramsci Writer -
Claude Levi-Strauss Anthropologist -
Martin Heidegger Philosopher -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
Roland Barthes Philosopher -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
Jacques Lacan Psychoanalyst -
Max Weber Sociologist -
Noam Chomsky Linguist -
Jurgen Habermas Philosopher -
Louis Althusser Philosopher -
Jean Baudrillard Philosopher -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Giorgio Agamben Philosopher -
Gilles Deleuze Philosopher