Quotes from Michel Foucault

Knowledge doesn't really form part of human nature. Conflict, combat, the outcome of the combat, and, consequently, risk and chance are what gives rise to knowledge. Knowledge is not instinctive; it is counter instinctive, just as it is not natural but counter natural.

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.

I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence.

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.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere.

One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.

The game is worthwhile in so far as we don't know what will be the end.

The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.

Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.

One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.

The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure.... And that's why S/M is really a subculture. It's a process of invention. S/M isthe use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.

Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.

Total surveillance is increasingly the general condition of society as a whole.

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

There are forms of oppression and domination which become invisible - the new normal.

Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves.

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.

This non-proletarianised plebs has been racialist when it has been colonialist; it has been nationalist - chauvinist - when it has been armed; and it has been fascist when it has become the police force.These ideological effects on the plebs have been uncontestable and profound.

Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or 'anatomy' of power, a technology.