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Quotes of Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher and historian. He held a chair at the Collège de France, giving it the title "History of Systems of Thought," and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Michel Foucault is best known for his critical studies of various social institutions, most notably psychiatry, medicine, the human sciences, and the prison system, as well as his work on the history of sexuality. Foucault's work concerning power, and the relationship between power, knowledge and discourse, has been widely discussed and applied. His work is sometimes described as postmodernist or post-structuralist, although during the 1960s he was more often associated with the structuralist movement. Foucault later distanced himself from structuralism and always rejected the post-structuralist and postmodernist labels.
- As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
- As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
- Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
- If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
- In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
- Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
- Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
- Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
- Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
- The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the "social worker" -judge.
- The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the "outlaw," the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
- 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.
- What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.