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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Michel Foucault Quotes

“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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“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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“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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“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.”

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Author:Michel Foucault
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