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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Michel Foucault Quotes

“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.”

MadeWholeLiteratureSpeakStrongSocialCenturyDemandAreasSeriesSpeciesAppearanceCategoriesReverseHomosexualityDiscoursePsychicsVocabularyBehalfPsychiatryFormationNineteenth CenturyLegitimacyPerversitySocial ControlJurisprudenceInversions
Author:Michel Foucault
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“A way of life can be shared among individuals of different ages, status, and social activity. It can yield intense relations not resembling those that are institutionalized. It seems to me that a way of life can yield a culture and an ethics. To be "gay," I think, is not to identify with the psychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual but to try and define and develop a way of life.”

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Author:Michel Foucault
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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.”

GivingLightNightBlackDarkBottomDenyClarityManifestationIntensityFlashLightningStarksDenseLight UpSingularityTransgression
Book:Religion and Culture
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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.”

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Author:Michel Foucault
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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.”

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Book:Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology
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“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.”

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Author:Michel Foucault
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“But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technological intervention, has been substituted for the soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the mastery that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”

MenHas BeensRealSoulBodyPoliticalExistenceEffectsObjectsExerciseIllusionReflectionPhilosophicalInstrumentsPrisonProfoundFactorsMasteryTechnologicalInvitedMisunderstandingTheologianInterventionAnatomyReal MenSubjection
Author:Michel Foucault
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“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”

RealPoliticalFightingViolenceTasksIndependentInstitutionsCriticizePolitical Violence
Book:The Chomsky - Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
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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.”

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Author:Michel Foucault
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“A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [...] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

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Author:Michel Foucault
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“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?”

ShouldArtDoneFactsArtistHouseIndividualOur LivesObjectsArt IsStrikesExpertsRelatedOur SocietyWorks Of ArtLamps
Author:Michel Foucault
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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.”

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Book:The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
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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.”

DoneHelpingActionLevelsExistenceBreakFunctionTheoreticalAlarmsReconcileSuggestingPrescribing
Book:Language, Counter-memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews
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“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.”

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Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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“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.”

TwoCountrySeaLandArmsThousandRiversInfiniteExcellenceBoundsShipsUncertaintyMidstPrisonerPassagesRoutesConfinedHomelandMadmenPassengersCrossroadsExpanseTwo Countries
Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”

KnowsWellsKindMayMeanPoliticalIndividualSocialLinesBattleConflictGainsInstrumentsEducationalAccessCarriePermitDiscourseDistributionMaintainingEducational SystemAppropriationModifying
Book:The Archaeology of Knowledge
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“Once leprosy had gone, and the figure of the leper was no more than a distant memory, these structures still remained. The game of exclusion would be played again, often in these same places, in an oddly similar fashion two or three centuries later. The role of the leper was to be played by the poor and by the vagrant, by prisoners and by the 'alienated', and the sort of salvation at stake for both parties in this game of exclusion is the matter of this study.”

StillsTwoMatterWould BeThreeGamesMemoriesPoorPartyRolesGoneStudyCenturyFashionFiguresSalvationStructurePrisonerStakesExclusionLeperVagrantsLeprosy
Book:History of Madness
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