Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucaultwas a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has been highly influential both for academic and for activist groups, such as within post-anarchism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth15 October 1926
CountryFrance
Michel Foucault quotes about
If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.
I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.
Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
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.
it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness
The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
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.
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.