Latest Michel Foucault Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• 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.

  Michel Foucault

  Government, Expression, Class

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper - and pessimistic - activism.

  Michel Foucault

  Pessimistic, Apathy, Activism

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• Political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.

  Michel Foucault

  Political, Support, Littles

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

  Michel Foucault

  Medicine, Support, Political

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

  Michel Foucault

  Real, Independent, Fighting

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• I believe that political power exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.

  Michel Foucault

  Believe, Independent, Exercise

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.

  Michel Foucault

  Teaching, Class, Way

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• It is one of my targets to show people that a lot of things that are part of their landscape - that people are universal - are the result of some very precise historical changes. All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.

  Michel Foucault

  Ideas, Space, People

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• 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.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, People, Way

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

  Michel Foucault

  Order, People, Political

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations.

  Michel Foucault

  Men, Thinking, Way

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• Why shouldn't I be interested in politics? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence, that is to say the society in which we live, the economic relations within which it functions, and the system of power which defines the regular forms and the regular permissions and prohibitions of our conduct. The essence of our life consists, after all, of the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves.

  Michel Foucault

  Essence, Political, Density

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

  Michel Foucault

  Book, Writing, Thinking

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• An American professor complained that a crypto-Marxist like me was invited in the USA, and I was denounced by the press in Eastern European countries for being an accomplice of the dissidents. None of these descriptions is important by itself; taken together, on the other hand, they mean something. And I must admit that I rather like what they mean.

  Michel Foucault

  Country, Taken, Mean

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism" I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things; I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake; the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

  Michel Foucault

  Book, Differences, People

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on.

  Michel Foucault

  Thinking, Squares, Political

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.

  Michel Foucault

  People, Intellectual, Mind

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.

  Michel Foucault

  People, Roles, Moments

  Source: www.nicklewis.org

• Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do. Sexual behavior is more than that.

  Michel Foucault

  Law, Hands, Desire

  Source: www.questia.com

• On the level of investigative results, John Boswell's methodology has led to the discovery that what has been called the repression of homosexuality does not date back to Christianity properly speaking, but developed within the Christian era at a much later date. In this type of analysis it is important to be aware of the way in which people conceived of their own sexuality.

  Michel Foucault

  Christian, Discovery, People

  Source: www.questia.com

• [John Boswell] introduction of the concept of "gay" (in the way he defines it) provides us both with a useful instrument of research and at the same time a better comprehension of how people actually conceive of themselves and their sexual behavior.

  Michel Foucault

  Gay, People, Way

  Source: www.questia.com

• Methodologically speaking, the rejection by [John] Boswell of the categorical opposition between homosexual and heterosexual, which plays such a significant role in the way our culture conceives of homosexuality, represents an advance not only in scholarship but in cultural criticism as well.

  Michel Foucault

  Play, Rejection, Criticism

  Source: www.questia.com

• 'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.

  Michel Foucault

  Doors, House, Prison

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.

  Michel Foucault

  Surveillance, Whole, Conditions

  Source: www.truth-out.org

• Little information is published on prisons, it is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life.

  Michel Foucault

  Dark, Littles, Information

  Source: www.critical-theory.com