Michel Foucault

Paul-Michel Foucault, generally known as Michel Foucault, was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, and literary critic. He was born on October 15, 1926 in Poitiers, France.

Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions who became one of the most influential and controversial scholars of the post-World War II period. His best-known works are Discipline and Punish and the multi-volume, but incomplete, The History of Sexuality.

Foucauldian discourse analysis is a form of discourse analysis, focusing on power relationships in society as expressed through language and practices and based on his theories.

Quotes

“People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.” ― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.” ― Michel Foucault

“Where there is power, there is resistance.” ― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?” ― Michel Foucault

“I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.” ― Michel Foucault

“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.” ― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader: An Introduction to Foucault's Thought

“...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing” ― Michel Foucault

“I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.” ― Michel Foucault

“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it?
What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know where it will end.” ― Michel Foucault

“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.” ― Michel Foucault

“The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.” ― Michel Foucault

“The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).” ― Michel Foucault

“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.” ― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky - Foucault Debate: On Human Nature

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.” ― Michel Foucault

“A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.” ― Michel Foucault

“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.” ― Michel Foucault

“The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.” ― Michel Foucault

“The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes. ” ― Michel Foucault

“The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.” ― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.” ― Michel Foucault

“What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?” ― Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason

“But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.” ― Michel Foucault

“There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” ― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.” ― Michel Foucault

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.” ― Michel Foucault, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.” ― Michel Foucault

“Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.” ― Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception

“Visibility is a trap.” ― Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison

“Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you're now doing: no, no, I'm not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?' 'What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing – with a rather shaky hand – a labyrinth into which I can venture, into which I can move my discourse... in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.” ― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language tags: nietzsche,

“I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.” ― Michel Foucault