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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Books

Philosopher

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“The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.”

PhilosophyCriticismActivism
Book:The Essential Foucault: Selections from the Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984
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“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

PhilosophyPostmodernismBorgesFoucaultPost Structuralism
Book:The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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“It is pointless to ask: Why then is sex so secret? What is this force that so long reduced it to silence and has only recently relaxed its hold somewhat, allowing us to question it perhaps, but always in the context of and through its repression? In reality, this question, so often repeated nowadays, is but the recent form of a considerable affirmation and a secular prescription: there is where the truth is; go see if you can uncover it. [...] It is reasonable therefore to ask first of all: What is this injunction? Why this great chase after the truth of sex, the truth in sex?”

PhilosophyTruthSexRepressionThe History Of Sexuality
Author:Michel Foucault
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“But, then, what is philosophy today—philosophical activity, I mean—if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity.”

ThinkingPhilosophyTruthKnowingThoughtDiscourseGenealogyPositivismMichel FoucaultLegitimization
Book:The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure
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“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

SchoolDisciplineAuthorityPrisonHospitalsSurveillanceSchoolsPrisonsBarracks
Author:Michel Foucault
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“Rien n'est plus inconsistant qu'un régime politique qui est indifférent à la vérité: mais rien n'est plus dangereux qu'un système politique qui prétend prescrire la vérité. La fonction du 'dire vrai' n'a pas à prendre la forme de la loi, tout comme il serait vain de croire qu'elle réside de plein droit dans les jeux spontanés de la communication. La tâche du dire vrai est un travail infini: la respecter dans sa complexité est une obligation dont aucun pouvoir ne peut faire l'économie. Sauf à imposer le silence de la servitude.”

SilenceServitudeDire VraiTravail Infini
Book:Dits et écrits, tome II : 1976-1988
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“Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists. From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.”

PhilosophyHumanismFoucault
Book:The Foucault Reader
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“The marvellous logic of the mad which seems to mock that of the logicians because it resembles it so exactly, or rather because it is exactly the same, and because at the secret heart of madness, at the core of so many errors, so many absurdities, so many words and gestures without consequence, we discover, finally, the hidden perfection of a language.”

Madness
Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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“Sadism ... is a massive cultural fact that appeared precisely at the end of the eighteenth century and that constitutes one of the greatest conversions of the occidental imagination ... madness of desire, the insane delight of love and death in the limitless presumption of appetite.”

CivilizationMadnessSadism
Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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“My role-and that is too emphatic a word-is to show people that they arc 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. To change something in the minds of people-that's the role of an intellectual.”

ChangeIntellectuals
Book:Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault
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“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.”

JudgmentNormality
Book:Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
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“[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărţi, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reţea.”

BookReadingLanguageKnowledgeBooksDiscourseFoucault
Book:The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
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“What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.”

SexSexualityFoucaultHistory Of Sexuality
Book:The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
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“That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears up confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the forces that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the power that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions – anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions.”

PowerDiscipline
Book:Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
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“If I feel like it and if I can be bothered to, I will talk to you about the notion of "repression," which has, I think, the twofold disadvantage, in the use that is made of it, of making obscure reference to a certain theory of sovereignty—the theory of the sovereign rights of the individual—and of bringing into play, when it is used, a whole set of psychological references borrowed from the human sciences, or in other words from discourses and practices that relate to the disciplinary domain. I think that the notion of "repression" is still, whatever critical use we try to make of it, a juridico-disciplinary notion; and to that extent the critical use of the notion of "repression" is tainted, spoiled, and rotten from the outset because it implies both a juridical reference to sovereignty and a disciplinary reference to normalization.”

PowerDisciplineSovereigntyRepression
Book:Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976
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“La objetividad en el historiador es la inversion de las relaciones entre el querer y el saber y, a la vez, la creencia necesaria en la providencia, en las causas finales y en la teología. El historiador pertenece a los ascetas. "No soporto a estos concupiscentes eunucos de la historia, a todos estos reclutadores del ideal ascético; no soporto a estos sepulcros blanqueados que engendran la vida; no soporto a esos seres fatigados y abúlicos que se arropan con la sabidría y creen tener una mirada objetiva.”

Friedrich NietzscheArcheologyOn The Genealogy Of Morals
Book:Nietzsche, la Genealogía, la Historia
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“Quant à l’oeuvre, les problèmes qu’elle soulève sont plus difficiles encore. En apparence pourtant, quoi de plus simple ? Une somme de textes qui peuvent être dénotés par le signe d’un nom propre. Or cette dénotation (même si on laisse de côté les problèmes de l’attribution) n’est pas une fonction homogène : le nom d’un auteur dénote-t-il de la même façon un texte qu’il a lui-même publié sous son nom, un texte qu’il a présenté sous un pseudonyme, un autre qu’on aura retrouvé après sa mort à l’état d’ébauche, un autre encore qui n’est qu’un griffonnage, un carnet de notes, un « papier » ? La constitution d’une oeuvre complète ou d’un opus suppose un certain nombre de choix qu’il n’est pas facile de justifier ni même de formuler : suffit-il d’ajouter aux textes publiés par l’auteur ceux qu’il projetait de donner à l’impression, et qui ne sont restés inachevés quer par le fait de la mort ? Faut-il intégrer aussi tout ce qui est brouillon, fait de la mort ? Faut-il intégrer aussi tout ce qui est brouillon, premier dessein, corrections et ratures des livres ? Faut-il ajouter les esquisses abandonnées? Et quel status donner aux lettres, aux notes, aux conversations rapportées, aux propos transcrits par les auditeurs, bref à cet immense fourmillement de traces verbales qu’un individu laisse autour de lui au moment de mourir, et qui parlent dans un entrecroisement indéfini tant de langages différents ? En tout cas le nom « Mallarmé » ne se réfère pas de la même façon aux thèmes anglais, aux trauctions d’Edgar Poe, aux poèmes, ou aux réponses à des enquêtes ; de même, ce n’est pas le même rapport qui existe entre le nom de Nietzsche d’une part et d’autre par les autobiographies de jeunesse, les dissertations scolaires, les articles philologiques, Zarathoustra, Ecce Homo, les lettres, les dernières cartes postales signées par « Dionysos » ou « Kaiser Nietzsche », les innombrables carnets où s’enchevêtrent les notes de blanchisserie et les projets d’aphorismes. En fait, si on parle si volontiers et sans s’interroger davantage de l’« oeuvre » d’un auteur, c’est qu’on la suppose définie par une certaine fonction d’expression. On admet qu’il doit y avoir un niveau (aussi profond qu’il est nécessaire de l’imaginer) auquel l’oeuvre se révèle, en tous ses fragments, même les plus minuscules et les plus inessentiels, comme l’expression de la pensée, ou de l’expérience, ou de l’imagination, ou de l’inconscient de l’auteur, ou encore des déterminations historiques dans lesquelles il était pris. Mais on voit aussitôt qu’une pareille unité, loin d’être donné immédiatement, est constituée par une opération ; que cette opération est interprétative (puisqu’elle déchiffre, dans le texte, la transcription de quelque chose qu’il cache et qu’il manifeste à la fois); qu’enfin l’opération qui détermine l’opus, en son unité, et par conséquent l’oeuvre elle-même ne sera pas la même s’il s’agit de l’auteur du Théâtre et son double ou de l’auteur du Tractatus et donc, qu’ici et là ce n’est pas dans le même sens qu’on parlera d’une « oeuvre ». L’oeuvre ne peut être considérée ni comme unité immédiate, ni comme une unité certaine, ni comme une unité homogène.”

BookWorkAuthorLivreAuteurOeuvre
Book:The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
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“It is surely the following kinds of question that would need to be posed: What types of knowledge do you want to disqualify in the very instant of your demand: 'Is it a science'? Which speaking, discoursing subjects -which subjects of experience and knowledge - d you then want to 'diminish' when you say: 'I who conduct this discourse am conducting a scientific discourse, and I am a scientist'? Which theoretical-political avant garde do you want to enthrone in order to isolate it from all the discontinuous forms of knowledge that circulate about it? When I see you straining to establish the scientificity of Marxism I do not really think that you are demonstrating once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that therefore its propositions are the outcome of verifiable procedures; for me you are doing something altogether different, you are investing Marxist discourses and those who uphold them with the effects of a power which the West since Medieval times has attributed to science and has reserved for those engaged in scientific discourse.”

ScienceKnowledgePowerMarxismHistory Of Thought
Book:Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
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“Le discours est partout comme il y a partout une apparence de liberté de parole. Mais cette liberté de parole est une illusion, car bien que le discours soit partout, pas tout le monde en produit également. Il y a un ordre du discours de la même façon qu’il y a un ordre social. L'étrangeté, c’est que l’ordre du discours ne crée pas un ordre véritable, mais un ordre hasardeux. Ce n’est pas ma force qui fera la force de mon discours, mais ma soumission.”

PhilosophyInspirational QuotesSpirituality
Author:Michel Foucault
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“The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, aa power capable of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep.”

PowerMichel Foucault
Author:Michel Foucault
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“Q: Doesn't this open up the possibility of overcoming the dualism of political struggles that eternally feed on the opposition between the state, on the one hand, and revolution, on the other? Doesn't it indicate a wider field of conflicts than that where the adversary is the state? Foucault: I would say that the state consists in the codification of a whole number of power relations that render its functioning possible, and that revolution is a different type of codification of the same relations.”

The StateMichel Foucault
Author:Michel Foucault
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“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

PhilosophyTruthKnowledgeMetaphysicsEpistemologyOntologyBorgesAbsurdismTaxonomyMeaning MakingSocial Constructionism
Book:The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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“A decadência da Europa nos oferece um espectáculo imenso cujos momentos mais fortes são omitidos ou são dispensados. O próprio da cena em que nos encontramos hoje é representar um teatro; sem monumentos que sejam nossa obra e que nos pertençam, nós vivemos cercados de cenários. Mas há mais: o europeu não sabe quem ele é; ele ignora que raças se misturam nele; ele procura que papel poderia ter; ele não tem individualidade.”

TeatroEuropaIndividualidadeDecadênciaéPocasClassicismoEspectáculo
Book:Microfísica del poder
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“Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.”

BureaucracyLawsPrison SystemGovernement
Book:Nietzsche, la Genealogía, la Historia
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“— Vous n'êtes pas sûr de ce que vous dites ? Vous allez de nouveau changer, vous déplacer par rapport aux questions qu'on vous pose, dire que les objections ne pointent pas réellement vers le lieu où vous vous prononcez ? Vous vous préparez à dire encore une fois que vous n'avez jamais été ce qu'on vous reproche d'être ? Vous aménagez déjà l'issue qui vous permettra, dans votre prochain livre, de resurgir ailleurs et de narguer comme vous le faites maintenant : non, non je ne suis pas là où vous me guettez, mais ici d'où je vous regarde en riant. — Eh quoi, vous imaginez-vous que je prendrais à écrire tant de peine et tant de plaisir, croyez-vous que je m'y serais obstiné, tête baissée, si je ne préparais — d'une main un peu fébrile — le labyrinthe où m'aventurer, déplacer mon propos, lui ouvrir des souterrains, l’enfoncer loin de lui-même, lui trouver des surplombs qui résument et déforment son parcours, où me perdre et apparaître finalement à des yeux que je n'aurai jamais plus à rencontrer. Plus d'un comme moi sans doute, écrivent pour n'avoir plus de visage. Ne me demandez pas qui je suis et ne me dites pas de rester le même : c'est une morale d'état civil; elle régit nos papiers. Qu'elle nous laisse libres quand il s'agir d'écrire.”

IdentitééCrireChangement
Book:The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
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“Los historiadores de las ideas atribuyen fácilmente a los filósofos y a los juristas del siglo XVIII el sueño de una sociedad perfecta; pero ha habido también un sueño militar de la sociedad; su referencia fundamental se hallaba no en el estado de naturaleza, sino en los engranajes cuidadosamente subordinados de una máquina, no en el contrato primitivo, sino en las coerciones permanentes, no en los derechos fundamentales, sino en la educación y formación indefinidamente progresivas, no en la voluntad general, sino en la docilidad automática.”

PoliticalPolíticaEconomía
Book:Vigilar y castigar: Nacimiento de la prisión
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“Se desarrolla entonces toda una problemática: la de una arquitectura que ya no está hecha simplemente para ser vista (fausto de los palacios) o para vigilar el espacio exterior (geometría de las fortalezas) sino para permitir un control interior, articulado y detallado (...); en términos generales, la de una arquitectura que habría de ser un operador para la transformación de los individuos: obrar sobre aquellos a quienes abriga, permitir apresar su conducta, conducir hasta ellos los efectos del poder, darlos a conocer, modificarlos.”

ControlPolíticaEconomíaArquitecturaCárcel
Book:Vigilar y castigar: Nacimiento de la prisión
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“Le sociologue, le psychanalyste, le linguiste, à mesure qu'ils travaillent et à mesure qu'ils avancent dans leur domaine, ne découvrent en réalité des structures beaucoup plus larges que l'homme, ils découvrent des formes de pensée qui, en quelque sorte, ne sont pas maîtrisées par notre conscience et par notre pensée à nous, homme individuel, et le structuralisme actuel n'est pas autre chose que la découverte de cet arrière-fond de pensée anonyme à l'intérieur duquel les hommes se trouvent pris. Par conséquent, en découvrant ces structures absolument universelles auxquelles nous sommes soumis, les sciences humaines ne découvrent pas un secret intérieur à l'homme, mais, au contraire, quelque chose, un réseau fatal, à l'intérieur duquel l'existence humaine se dissout. C'est cette dissolution de l'homme par le savoir même que nous en prenons qui me paraît être le phénomène contemporain le plus caractéristique. Et par conséquent, c'est bien la mort de l'homme que nous sommes en train de vivre maintenant à l'intérieur de notre savoir.”

Savoir
Author:Michel Foucault
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