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Michel Foucault

Read through the most famous quotes from Michel Foucault




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


#wisdom #age

Where there is power, there is resistance.


— Michel Foucault


#leftism #power #resistance #resistance

The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.


— Michel Foucault


#enlightenment

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


#optimism #resistance #struggle #optimism

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

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.


— Michel Foucault


#nature #secrets #nature

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?


— Michel Foucault


#nature #norms #age

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.


— Michel Foucault


#date #easily #end #invention #man

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.


— Michel Foucault


#certain #complex #endowed #institution #name

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.


— Michel Foucault


#different #educating #essentially #function #power






About Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault Quotes




Did you know about Michel Foucault?

At the ENS Foucault's classmates unanimously summed him up as a figure who was both "disconcerting and strange" and "a passionate worker". In 1954 Foucault authored an introduction to Binswager's paper "Dream and Existence" in which he argued that dreams constituted "the birth of the world" or "the heart laid bare" expressing the mind's deepest desires. He would praise sado-masochistic activity in interviews with the gay press describing it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure which people had no idea about previously.

Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions most notably psychiatry social anthropology of medicine the human sciences the prison system and the history of human sexuality. Foucault died in Paris of neurological problems compounded by HIV/AIDS; he was the first public figure in France to have died from the disease with his partner Daniel Defert founding the AIDES charity in his memory. From 1966 to 1968 he lectured at the University of Tunis Tunisia before returning to France where he involved himself in several protest movements and left-wing groups.

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