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Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes

Philosopher

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Famous Michel Foucault Quotes

“There is a sort of myth of History that philosophers have.... History for philosophers is some sort of great, vast continuity in which the freedom of individuals and economic or social determinations come and get entangled. When someone lays a finger on one of those great themes--continuity, the effective exercise of human liberty, how individual liberty is articulated with social determinations--when someone touches one of these three myths, these good people start crying out that History is being raped or murdered.”

PeopleHumansThreeIndividualSocialLibertyHistoryEconomicCryExerciseDeterminationLaysFingersPhilosopherMythThemeGood PeopleContinuityIndividual Liberty
Author:Michel Foucault
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“The appearance in nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence, and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and "psychic hermaphroditism" made possible a strong advance of social controls into this area of "perversity"; but it also made possible the formation of a "reverse" discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or "naturality" be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified.”

MadeWholeLiteratureSpeakStrongSocialCenturyDemandAreasSeriesSpeciesAppearanceCategoriesReverseHomosexualityDiscoursePsychicsVocabularyBehalfPsychiatryFormationNineteenth CenturyLegitimacyPerversitySocial ControlJurisprudenceInversions
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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“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”

KnowsWellsKindMayMeanPoliticalIndividualSocialLinesBattleConflictGainsInstrumentsEducationalAccessCarriePermitDiscourseDistributionMaintainingEducational SystemAppropriationModifying
Book:The Archaeology of Knowledge
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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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