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Foucault Quotes

Browse 28 quotes about Foucault.

Foucault Quotes

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

PhilosophyPostmodernismBorgesFoucaultPost Structuralism
Book:The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
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“Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved. Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time when people supported the humanistic values represented by National Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists. From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.”

PhilosophyHumanismFoucault
Book:The Foucault Reader
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“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”

NatureDepressionCapitalismMadnessMental HealthMental IllnessIdeologyNeoliberalismFoucaultCapitalist RealismD GLaing
Book:Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
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“[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărţi, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reţea.”

BookReadingLanguageKnowledgeBooksDiscourseFoucault
Book:The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language
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“The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation of an electromagnetic disturbance. Finally, the principle of relativity gives the velocity of light a still greater importance, since one of its fundamental postulates is the constancy of this velocity under all possible conditions.”

ImportantLightNatureJustificationNaturalismVelocitySpeed Of LightMaxwellNobel LaureateFoucaultElectromagnetismJames Clerk MaxwellJames MaxwellVelocity Of LightFizeauHippolyte FizeauJean Bernard Léon FoucaultLéon Foucault
Book:Studies in Optics
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“What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.”

SexSexualityFoucaultHistory Of Sexuality
Book:The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction
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“Foucault’s description of an eighteenth-century soldier is also an accurate portrait of the typical citizen of District 13. The District 13 citizen is 'something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit.' If you enact this process on the scale of a whole society, you get a populace that literally embodies obedience.”

PhilosophyBodiesHunger GamesFoucaultHunger Games PhilosophyDistrict 13
Author:Christina Van Dyke
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“Just a few nights ago the roaring fire prompted a conversation about Gaston Bachelard's Psychoanalysis of Fire,' I said to Foucault. 'Did you by any chance know Bachelard?' 'Yes, I did,' Foucault responded. 'He was my teacher and exerted a great influence upon me.' 'I can just visualize Bachelard musing before his hearth and devising the startling thesis that mankind tamed fire to stimulate his daydreaming, that man is fundamentally the dreaming animal.' 'Not really,' Foucault blurted out. 'Bachelard probably never saw a fireplace or ever listened to water streaming down a mountainside. With him it was all a dream. He lived very ascetically in a cramped two-room flat he shared with his sister.' 'I have read somewhere that he was a gourmet and would shop every day in the street markets to get the freshest produce for his dinner.' 'Well, he undoubtedly shopped in the outdoor markets,' Foucault responded impatiently, 'but his cuisine, like his regimen, was very plain. He led a simple life and existed in his dream.' 'Do you shop in the outdoor markets in Paris?' Jake asked Michel. 'No,' Foucault laughed, 'I just go to the supermarket down the street from where I live.”

GourmetFoucaultBachelard
Book:Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]
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“Like the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, postmodernism seeks to institutionalize dishonesty as a legitimate school of thought. The idea of truth as the ultimate goal of the intellectual is discarded. In its place, scholars are asked to pursue political objectives--so long as those political objectives are the 'correct' ones. Postmodernism is not fringe within the community of scholars. It is central. This tells us a great deal about the life of the mind today. Peruse any university course catalogue, and you find names like Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes. Scour the footnotes of scholarly books and journals and a similar story unfolds. With the primacy of philosophies--postmodernism, Critical Theory, and even the right-leaning Straussianism--that exalt dishonesty in the service of supposedly noble causes, is it at all surprising that liars like Alfred Kinsey, Rigoberta Menchu, Alger Hiss, and Margaret Sanger have achieved a venerated status among the intellectuals?”

PostmodernismDerridaFoucaultCritical TheoryBarthesMargaret SangerAlger HissAlfred KinseyRigoberta MenchuSodomites
Book:Intellectual Morons: How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas
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“One problem with taking on a physical or mental disability as an identity is that it disincentivizes any possible mitigation of the disability.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts -forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice- that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist of sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms). sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Mental health activism also frequently regards mental illness as a marginalized identity. One problem with this approach is that people tend to get attached to their identities and this may discourage some from seeking treatment and trying to recover.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, l even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of "the greater good".”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucaultProgressivenism
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they're free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.”

LeftIdeologyProgressivePostmodernismWokeSjwDerridaFoucault
Book:Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody
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“Dans la cour de l'hôpital éclairée par ce soleil de juin qui devenait la pire injure au malheur, je compris, pour la première fois car quand Stéphane l'avait dit je n'avais pas voulu le croire, que Muzil allait mourir, incessament sous peu, et cette certitude me défigura dans le regard des passants qui me croisaient, ma face en bouille s'écoulait dans mes pleurs et volait en morceaux dans mes cris, j'étais fou de douleur, j'étais le Cri de Munch.”

DeathAidsScreamFoucaultMunch
Book:À l'ami qui ne m'a pas sauvé la vie
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“[...] white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought. Since the ideas of the Black Panther Party are limited to concerns with ethnic racism elsewhere, they do not register as thought qua thought, and can thus be exploited by and elevated to universality only in the hands of European thinkers such as Foucault, albeit without receiving any credit. [Dear reader, if this reminds you of the colonial expropriation of natural resources, you would be neither wrong nor alone in making such an assumption. In the words of Kanye West: that shit cray.]”

White SupremacyInstitutional RacismFoucaultBlack Panther PartyKanye WestColoniality
Book:Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
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“If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions.”

ChristianityInstitutionsTheologyDoctrineChurchesFoucaultEmergent ChurchNondenominational
Book:Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?: Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church
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“Pensando en las transformaciones de la sociedad europea de finales del siglo XVIII, Foucault describe el paso de lo que él llama una «sociedad soberana» a una «sociedad disciplinaria» como el desplazamiento de una forma de poder que decide y ritualiza la muerte a una nueva forma de poder que calcula técnicamente la vida en términos de población, salud e interés nacional. Foucault llama biopoder a esta nueva forma de poder productor, difuso y tentacular. El poder desborda así el dominio de lo jurídico, del ámbito punitivo, para volverse una fuerza que penetra y constituye el cuerpo del individuo moderno. Este poder ya no se comporta como una ley coercitiva, como un mandato negativo, sino que, más versátil y acogedor, adquiere la forma de una tecnología política general, metamorfoseándose en arquitecturas disciplinarias (prisión, cuartel, escuela,, hospital, etc.), textos científicos, tablas estadísticas, cálculos demográficos, modos de empleo, recomendaciones de uso, calendarios de regulación de vida y proyectos de higiene pública. Foucault había intuido la centralidad del sexo y de la sexualidad en el moderno arte de gobernar la vida: los procesos de histerización del cuerpo femenino, la pedagogía del sexo del niño, la regulación de las conductas de procreación y la psiquiatrización de placeres perversos serán para Foucault los ejes de este proyecto, al que caracteriza, no sin ironía, como un proceso de modernización de la sexualidad.”

SexualidadFoucaultModernidad
Book:Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
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“What was it like for you before the gay movement?' the young gay student asked. 'You might not believe this.' Foucault replied, 'but I actually liked the scene before the gay liberation, when everything was more covert. It was like an underground fraternity, exciting and a bit dangerous. Friendship meant a lot, it meant a lot of trust, we protected each other, we related to each other by secret codes.”

FoucaultGay Liberation
Book:Foucault in California [A True Story—Wherein the Great French Philosopher Drops Acid in the Valley of Death]
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“Hoy la situación parece mucho más compleja: el cuerpo individual funciona como una extensión de las tecnologías globales de comunicación. Dicho con la feminista americana Donna Haraway, el cuerpo del siglo XXI es una plataforma tecnoviva, el resultado de una implosión irreversible de sujeto y objeto, de lo natural y lo artificial. De ahí que la noción misma de «vida» resulte arcaica para identificar los actores de esta nueva tecnoecología. Por ello, Donna Haraway prefiere la noción de «tecnobiopoder» a la foucaultiana de «biopoder», puesto que va no se trata de poder sobre la vida, de poder de gestionar y maximizar la vida, como quería Foucault, sino de poder y control sobre un todo tecnovivo conectado.”

FeminismoFoucaultHarawayBiopoderTecnobiopoderTecnovivo
Book:Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era
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