Quotes from Michel Foucault

Devant la justice du souverain toutes les voix doivent se taire.

make the amende honorable

El exceso y la pasividad son, para un hombre, las dos formas mayores de la inmoralidad en la práctica de las aphrodisia.

During the years 1945-1965, there was a certain way of thinking correctly, a certain style of political discourse, a certain ethics of the intellectual. One had to be on familiar terms with Marx, not let one's dreams stray too far from Freud.

I dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it.

Chaque individu doit mener sa vie de manière à ce que les autres puissent la respecter et l'admirer.

Artemidoro, en todo caso, ha hecho algo muy diferente que compilar los ejemplos más célebres de los presagios oníricos confirmados por la realidad. Ha emprendido la tarea de escribir una obra de método, y esto en dos sentidos: deberá ser un manual utilizable en la práctica cotidiana y deberá ser, también, un tratado de alcance teórico sobre la validez de los procedimientos interpretativos.

It would be hypocritical or naïve to believe that the law was made for all in the name of all; that it would be more prudent to recognise that it was made for the few and that it was brought to bear upon the others; that in principle it applies to all citizens, but that it is addressed principally to the most numerous and least enlightened classes.

Là où il y a pouvoir, il y a résistance.

Police surveillance provides the prison with offenders, which the prison transforms into delinquents, the targets and auxiliaries of police supervisions, which regularly send back a certain number of them to prison.

Qui, au fond, a eu l'idée de retourner le principe de Clausewitz, qui a eu l'idée de dire : il se peut bien que la guerre soit la politique menée par d'autres moyens, mais la politique elle-même n'est-elle pas la guerre menée par d'autres moyens?

it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power.

All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning -- not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.

El uso de los placeres está consagrado a la forma en que la actividad sexual ha sido problematizada por los filósofos y los médicos, en la cultura griega clásica del siglo IV a.C.; La inquietud de sí está consagrado a esta problematización en los textos griegos y latinos de los dos primeros siglos de nuestra era; finalmente, Las confesiones de la carne* trata de la formación de la doctrina y de la pastoral de la carne.

the pillory was abolished in France in 1789 and in England in 1837.

We must show that punitive measures are not simply 'negative' mechanisms that make it possible to repress, to prevent, to exclude, to eliminate; but that they are linked to a whole series of positive and useful effects which it is their task to support.

in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice

Those who carry out the penalty tend to become an autonomous sector; justice is relieved of responsibility for it by a bureaucratic concealment of the penalty itself. It is typical that in France the administration of the prisons should for so long have been the responsibility of the Ministry of the Interior, while responsibility for the bagnes, for penal servitude in the convict ships and penal settlements, lay with the Ministry of the Navy or the Ministry of the Colonies.

And the sentence that condemns or acquits is not simply a judgement of guilt, a legal decision that lays down punishment; it bears within it an assessment of normality and a technical prescription for a possible normalization. Today the judge- magistrate or juror certainly does more than 'judge'.

The demand [exigence] for an identity and the injunction to break that identity, both feel, in the same way abusive.

Death was reduced to a visible, but instantaneous event. Contact between the law, or those who carry it out, and the body of the criminal, is reduced to a split second. There is no physical confrontation; the executioner need be no more than a meticulous watchmaker.

The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth.

The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated.

One makes war to win, not because it's just.