Michel Foucault Quotes - Page 4

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• 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.

  Michel Foucault

  Beautiful, Smart, Stupid

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• As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

  Michel Foucault

  Men, Invention, Ends

  The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences ch. 10 (1966)

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• One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.

  Michel Foucault

  Character, Exercise, Power

  Michael Kelly, Michel Foucault (1994). “Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate”, p.35, MIT Press

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• it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime

  Michel Foucault

  Punishment, Crime, Certainty

  Michel Foucault (2012). “Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison”, p.9, Vintage

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• It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

  Michel Foucault

  Knowledge, Science, Essentials

  Michel Foucault (1987). “Maladie Mentale Et Psychologie”, p.73, Univ of California Press

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• Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action-a perilous act.

  Michel Foucault

  Alarms, Done, Levels

  Michel Foucault (1980). “Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews”, p.5, Cornell University Press

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• 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

  Mean, Justice, Doe

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• The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

  Michel Foucault

  Book, Reality, Imagination

  Michel Foucault (1998). “Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology”, p.106, The New Press

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• 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

  14 Copy quote

• 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

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• 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

  30 Copy quote

• Let us ask... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.

  Michel Foucault

  Power, Desire, Trying

  "The History of Sexuality". Book by Michel Foucault, p. 97, 1984.

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• For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question.

  Michel Foucault

  Animal, Men, Political

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• One makes war to win, not because it's just.

  Michel Foucault

  War, Winning

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

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• In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.

  Michel Foucault

  Dream, Adventure, Civilization

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• 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

  Confused, Expression, Breathe

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• 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

  Writing, Who I Am, Order

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• There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?

  Michel Foucault

  Philosophy, Thinking, Knowing

  "Discipline and Punish". Book by Michel Foucault, 1977.

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• Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

  Michel Foucault

  Death, Truth, Philosophy

  Michel Foucault (2012). “The Birth of the Clinic”, p.211, Routledge

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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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• What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.

  Michel Foucault

  Art, Our Society, Facts

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• 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

  Fighting, Thinking, Order

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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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• 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. 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 love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

  Michel Foucault

  Love, Book, Writing

  "Truth, Power, Self". Interview with Rux Martin (October 25, 1982) as quoted in "Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault", book edited by ‎Luther H. Martin,‎ Huck Gutman and‎ Patrick H. Hutton, January 7, 1988.

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• 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

  22 Copy quote

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