Top 100 Michel Foucault Sayings
#1. Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
Jeffrey Eugenides
#2. Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
Michel Foucault
#4. Chance does not speak essentially through words nor can it be seen in their convolution. It is the eruption of language, its sudden appearance. It's not a night twinkle with stars, an illuminated sleep, nor a drowsy vigil. It is the very edge of consciousness.
Michel Foucault
#5. In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.
Michel Foucault
#6. 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.
Michel Foucault
#7. Truth is not by nature free-nor error servile-its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
Michel Foucault
#8. Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere.
Michel Foucault
#9. Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
Michel Foucault
#10. Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
Michel Foucault
#11. Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
Michel Foucault
#12. One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.
Michel Foucault
#13. Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Michel Foucault
#14. If you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing
Michel Foucault
#15. Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles; but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power; they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.
Michel Foucault
#16. Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
Michel Foucault
#17. Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power...it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.
Michel Foucault
#18. Politics and the economy are not things that exist, or illusions, or ideologies. They are things that do not exist and yet which are inscribed in reality and fall under a regime of truth dividing the true and the false.
Michel Foucault
#19. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
#20. 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.
Michel Foucault
#21. There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
Michel Foucault
#22. We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.
Michel Foucault
#23. How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?
Michel Foucault
#24. Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester's cap and bells.
Michel Foucault
#25. It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that were have never said enough on the subject ... where sex is concerned the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own.
Michel Foucault
#26. Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse.
Michel Foucault
#27. Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.
Michel Foucault
#28. From the point of view of wealth, there is no difference between need, comfort and pleasure
Michel Foucault
#29. Do not acid vapors have the very properties of melancholia, whereas alcoholic vapors, always ready to burst into flame, suggest frenzy; and sulfurous vapors, agitated by a violent and continuous movement, indicate mania?
Michel Foucault
#31. The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government. Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated ...
Michel Foucault
#33. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species
Michel Foucault
#35. States are not populated in accordance with the natural progression of propagation, but by virtue of their industry, their products, and their different institutions. ... Men multiply like the yields from the ground and in proportion to the advantages and resources they find in their labors.
Michel Foucault
#36. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.
Michel Foucault
#37. After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover ... in our discourse, in our freedom, in our thought.
Michel Foucault
#38. We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it 'excludes', it 'represses'... in fact power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.
Michel Foucault
#39. The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
Michel Foucault
#40. Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness; it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
Michel Foucault
#41. 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.
Michel Foucault
#42. 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.
Michel Foucault
#43. The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
Michel Foucault
#44. It's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
Michel Foucault
#46. Self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.
Michel Foucault
#47. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else.
FOUCAULT MICHEL
#48. This knowledge, so inaccessible, so formidable, the Fool, in his innocent idiocy, already possesses.
Michel Foucault
#49. Religion for them [Iranians] was like a promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity
Michel Foucault
#50. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.
Michel Foucault
#51. 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.
Michel Foucault
#53. I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.
Michel Foucault
#54. Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
Michel Foucault
#55. We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.
Michel Foucault
#56. A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
Michel Foucault
#57. Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
Michel Foucault
#58. All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
#59. In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
Michel Foucault
#60. In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Michel Foucault
#61. The game is worthwhile in so far as we don't know what will be the end.
FOUCAULT MICHEL
#62. It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
Michel Foucault
#63. [Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.
Michel Foucault
#64. It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
Michel Foucault
#65. Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
Michel Foucault
#67. The manifest discourse, therefore, is really no more than the repressive presence of what it does not say; and this 'not-said' is a hollow that undermines from within all that is said.
Michel Foucault
#68. I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
Michel Foucault
#69. If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
Michel Foucault
#70. The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness
Michel Foucault
#71. Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history
Michel Foucault
#72. Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
Michel Foucault
#73. People can tolerate two homosexuals they see leaving together, but the next day they're smiling, holding hands, tenderly embracing one another, then they cannot be forgiven. It is not the departure for pleasure that is unacceptable, it is waking up happy.
Michel Foucault
#74. One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.
Michel Foucault
#75. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.
Michel Foucault
#76. 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.
Michel Foucault
#77. Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
Michel Foucault
#78. I am hopelessly in love with a memory.
An echo from another time, another place.
Michel Foucault
#79. Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.
Michel Foucault
#80. I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Michel Foucault
#81. Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.
Michel Foucault
#82. There are times in
life when the question of knowing if one can think differently
than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is
absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting
at all.
Michel Foucault
#83. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
Michel Foucault
#84. It [Iranian Islamic Revolution] is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.
Michel Foucault
#85. Today, criminal justice functions and justifies itself only by this perpetual reference to something other than itself, by this unceasing reinscription in non-juridical systems.
Michel Foucault
#86. What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
Michel Foucault
#87. We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.
Michel Foucault
#88. The strategic adversary is fascism ... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Michel Foucault
#89. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.
Michel Foucault
#90. Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
Michel Foucault
#91. It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
Michel Foucault
#92. madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.
Michel Foucault
#93. 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.
Michel Foucault
#94. Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault
#95. The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
Michel Foucault
#96. And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
Michel Foucault
#97. Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
Michel Foucault
#98. There is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.
Michel Foucault
#99. Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
Michel Foucault
#100. I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
Michel Foucault
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