Michel Foucault Quotes - Page 5

Quotes about:

• 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

  23 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Creating, Space

  Michel Foucault (1998). “Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology”, p.206, The New Press

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• I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

  Michel Foucault

  Personal Question, Problem, Absence

  Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault (2006). “The Chomsky - Foucault Debate: On Human Nature”, p.30, The New Press

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• [Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that the first text one writes is neither written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's way of being through the act of writing.

  Michel Foucault

  Morning, Book, Writing

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• Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity.

  Michel Foucault

  Dark, Night, Light

  Michel Foucault, Jeremy Carrette (2013). “Religion and Culture”, p.61, Routledge

  20 Copy quote

• 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

  6 Copy quote

• In the Renaissance, madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other side of bars; if present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed.

  Michel Foucault

  Distance, Eye, Animal

  Michel Foucault (2001). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.66, Psychology Press

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• Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

  Michel Foucault

  Believe, Castration, Sedentary

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• 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

  Hypocrisy, Facts, Modern

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.47, Vintage

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• The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.

  Michel Foucault

  Strong, Psychics, Vocabulary

  "The History of Sexuality, Volume I: The Will to Knowledge". Book by Michel Foucault, 1978.

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• 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

  Trying, Doe, Different

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.27, Vintage

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• 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

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• 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

  Eye, Waiting, Generations

  Michel Foucault (2000). “Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel”, p.176, A&C Black

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• In actual fact. The manifold sexualities - those which appear with the different ages (sexualities of the infant or the child), those which become fixated on particular tastes or practices (the sexuality of the invert, the gerontophile, the fetishist), those which, in a diffuse manner, invest relationships (the sexuality of doctor and patient, teacher and student, psychiatrist and mental patient), those which haunt spaces (the sexuality of the home, the school, the prison)- all form the correlate of exact procedures of power.

  Michel Foucault

  Teacher, Children, School

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.47, Vintage

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• We demand that sex speak the truth and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.

  Michel Foucault

  Sex, Thinking, Demand

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• 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

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• Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.

  Michel Foucault

  Night, Vanity, Light

  Michel Foucault (2013). “Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason”, p.111, Vintage

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• There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.

  Michel Foucault

  Determination, Exercise, People

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• 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

  Justice, Criminals, Today

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.19, Vintage

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• Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

  Michel Foucault

  Believe, Reality, Law

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• 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

  Helping Others, Two, Identity

  Michel Foucault, Jeremy Carrette (2013). “Religion and Culture”, p.208, Routledge

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• 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

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• The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.

  Michel Foucault

  Animal, Men, Needs

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The History of Sexuality: An Introduction”, p.59, Vintage

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• One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

  Michel Foucault

  Men, Madness, Problem

  Michel Foucault (2005). “The Order of Things”, p.421, Routledge

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• It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

  Michel Foucault

  Names, Speak, Reason

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