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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Michel Foucault Quotes

“'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth.”

EffectsProduceTruth IsUnderstoodRelationProductionsStatementsOperationsRegimesRegulationLinkedDistributionProceduresCirculationKnowledge And Power
Book:The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
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“In the Renaissance, madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other side of bars; if present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed.”

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Book:Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason
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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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“[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.”

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Book:The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
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“Thought is not what inhabits a certain conduct and gives it its meaning; rather, it is what allows one to step back from this way of acting or reacting, to present it to oneself as an object of thought and to question it as to its meaning, its conditions, and its goals. Thought is freedom in relation to what one does, the motion by which one detaches from it, establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.”

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Author:Michel Foucault
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“If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism" I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things; I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake; the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.”

PeopleIfsWorldWayBookWholeDifferencesMoralityEssentialsConcernRelationMy WayStakesAdversariesSearch For TruthInfantileAccusing
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.”

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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.”

ThinkingWayTryingDifferentSeemsAgeCultureIndividualSocialGayActivityEthicsRelationIntensePsychologicalVisibleMaskYieldTraitsHomosexualDifferent Ages
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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