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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Michel Foucault Quotes

“We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. ... The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. ... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.”

NeedsShouldBodyFormCausesImpossibleEffectsInformationObjectsExerciseDiscoveryAddKnowledge And Power
Author:Michel Foucault
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“Take the notion of tradition: it is intended to give a special temporal status to a group of phenomena that are both successive and identical (or at least similar); it makes it possible to rethink the dispersion of history in the form of the same; it allows a reduction of the difference proper to every beginning, in order to pursue without discontinuity the endless search for origin.”

GivingFormOrderDifferencesGroupsSpecialTraditionNotionEndlessPursueIdenticalReductionDiscontinuityDispersion
Book:Archaeology of Knowledge
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“Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.”

ArtWholeFormLawPoetryOrderLiteratureLanguageExistenceBreakDefinitionsGenreManifestationOppositionRepresentationDiscourseAdaptedAffirming
Book:The Order of Things
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“Sexuality is a part of our behavior. It's part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create. It is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desire. We have to understand that with our desires go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality; it's a possibility for creative life. It's not enough to affirm that we are gay but we must also create a gay life.”

WorldEnoughFormDesireSexSidesSecretCreativeCreationPossibilityGayBehaviorDiscoverySexualityOur WorldHomosexualityCreative LifeFatalityForms Of LoveGay Life
Author:Michel Foucault
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“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.”

FormPoliticalExistenceOur LivesEconomicSubjectsEssenceFunctionRelationIdeologyCrucialPermissionBlindnessProhibitionDensityDeafness
Author:Michel Foucault
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“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.”

StatesGovernmentFormPoliticalTermBehindsClassEconomicConditionsExpressionActivityInstrumentsExploitationDominantDominationDiscernmentSuppressionInsufficient
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.”

ChildrenDifferentFactsHomeAgeSchoolFormSpacePracticeTeacherStudentsParticularTasteDoctorsPrisonPatientSexualityInfantProceduresPsychiatristManifoldTeacher And StudentDoctors And PatientsDifferent AgesInvert
Book:The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
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“What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression”

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

BelieveLongRealityFormLawDifferencesLimitsNegativeFlowSacredUnityWesternAccessProductiveCategoriesMultipleArrangementsMobileAllegianceUniformityNomadicSedentaryCastration
Author:Michel Foucault
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