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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Michel Foucault Quotes

“... we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. Power constantly asks questions and questions us; it constantly investigates and records; it institutionalizes the search for the truth, professionalizes it, and rewards it. ... In a different sense, we are also subject to the truth in the sense that truth lays down the law: it is the discourse of truth that decides, at least in part; it conveys and propels effects of power.”

NeedsDifferentLawOrderAsksRecordsSubjectsEffectsProduceDemandFunctionLaysRewardsDiscourseObligedKnowledge 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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“Confession frees, but power reduces one to silence; truth does not belong to the order of power, but shares an origincal affinity with freedom: traditional themes in philosophy, which a political history of truth would have to overturn by showing that truth is not by nature free--nor error servile--but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. The confession is an example of this.”

DoePhilosophyPoliticalOrderSilenceShareExampleTruth IsRelationErrorsProductionsTraditionalThemeConfessionAffinityPolitical History
Book:The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
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“We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it isgood-and that is the real theater-totranscend them in the manner of play, bymeans of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put "inplay," show up, transform and reversethe systems which quietly order us about.”

WayLooksLongRealPlayShowsOrderGirlGamesBoysHairTheaterVicesDirtyIronyRitualTiedArbitraryVice VersaBourgeoisLong Hair
Author:Michel Foucault
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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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“To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.”

KnowsFirstsSaidEnoughPlayLastsScienceOrderGrowsKnowledgeGrowing UpTraditionRaisesRefuseSeedsHistorianOriginalityAnticipationUniquenessEchoesRoyalAmusementAccumulationFidelityPortPredecessors
Author:Michel Foucault
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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.”

TryingLittlesHelpingSchoolBeautifulOrderBitsBoysStupidLittle BitIntellectualSmartAttractiveHomeworkVery BeautifulVery Stupid
Author:Michel Foucault
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