Quotes from Michel Foucault

What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.

Madness, in which the values of another age, another art, another morality are called into question but which also reflects - blurred and disturbed, strangely compromised by one another in a common chimera - all the forms, even the most remote, of the human imagination.

Es preciso que la justicia criminal, en lugar de vengarse, castigue al fin. Esta necesidad de un castigo sin suplicio se formula en primer lugar como un grito del corazón o de la naturaleza indignada: en el peor de los asesinos, hay una cosa al menos que debe respetarse cuando se castiga: su "humanidad".

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 a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

It is possible that the West has not been capable of inventing any new pleasures, and it has doubtless not discovered any original vices. But it has defined new rules for the game of powers and pleasures.

Le voyage rajeunit les choses, et il vieillit le rapport à soi.

Hay que admitir, en suma, que este poder se ejerce más que se posee, que no es el "privilegio" adquirido o conservado de la clase dominante sino el efecto de conjunto de sus posiciones estratégicas, efecto que manifiesta, y a veces acompaña, la posición de aquellos que son dominados.

Si vous saviez, lorsque vous commencez à écrire un livre, ce que vous allez dire à la fin, croyez-vous que vous auriez le courage de l'écrire?

The circle of day and night is the law of the classical world: the most reduced bust the most demanding of the world's necessities, the most inevitable but the simplest of nature's legalities.

La medicina de las especies se compromete en una atención renovada a lo individual, una atención cada vez más impaciente y menos capaz de soportar las formas generales de percepción, las lecturas apresuradas de esencia.

Censura respecto al sexo? Más bien se ha construido un artefacto para producir discursos sobre el sexo, siempre más discursos, susceptibles de funcionar y de surtir efecto en su economía misma.

The processes of objectification originate in the very tactics of power and of the arrangement of its exercise.

Il punto più intenso delle vite, quello in cui si concentra la loro energia, è proprio là dove si scontrano con il potere, si dibattono con esso, tentano di utilizzare le sue forze o di sfuggire alle sue trappole.

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 a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.

por el poder de hacer vivir o de arrojar a la muerte.

We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that 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.

Knowledge is not for knowing, knowledge is for cutting.

I am not a writer, a philosopher, or a great figure of intellectual life. I am a teacher. […] My role is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes that have been built up at a certain moment in history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people—that is the role of an intellectual.

As a result, we must entirely reverse the traditional idea of the author. We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely.

Enfermé dans le navire, d'où on n'échappe pas, le fou est confié à la rivière aux mille bras, à la mer aux mille chemins, à cette grande incertitude extérieure à tout. Il est prisonnier au milieu de la plus libre, de la plus ouverte des routes : solidement enchaîné à l'infini carrefour. Il est le Passager par excellence, c'est-à-dire le prisonnier du Passage.

Poor vagabonds, criminals, and "deranged minds" would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain—essentially that major form of a rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration.

The criticism that was often levelled at the penitentiary system in the early nineteenth century (imprisonment is not a sufficient punishment: prisoners are less hungry, less cold, less deprived in general than many poor people or even workers) suggests a postulate that was never explicitly denied: it is just that a condemned man should suffer physically more than other men. It is difficult to dissociate punishment from additional physical pain. What would a non-corporal punishment be?

In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates

the rat of India is pernicious to the crocodile, since nature has created them enemies; in such wise when the violent reptile takes his pleasure in the sun, the rat lays ambush for it in moral subtlety; perceiving that the crocodile, lying unaware for delight, is sleeping with his jaws agape, it makes its way through them and slips down the wide throat into the crocodile's belly, gnawing through the entrails of which, it emerges at last from the slain beast's bowel