Quotes from Michel Foucault

The nineteenth century and our own have been rather the age of multiplication: a dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their disparate forms, a multiple implantation of perversions. Our epoch has initiated sexual heterogeneities.

it becomes probable that the so-called immaterial hysterical affection and hypochondriacal disease derive from the dispositions of the particular state of the fibers." It is to this sensibility, this mobility, that we must attribute the sufferings, the spasms, the singular pains so readily suffered by "young girls of pale complexion, and individuals too much given to study and meditation.

In short, the history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the interruption of events in favour of stable structures.

Islam, in the year 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without spirit.

The punishment must proceed from the crime; the law must appear to be a necessity of things, and power must act while concealing itself beneath the gentle force of nature.

Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.

With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.

Writing unfolds like a game that invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is rather a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.

History is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.

Among the mutations that have affected the knowledge of things ... only one, which began a century and a half ago ... has allowed the figure of man to appear.

The public execution did not re-establish justice; it reactivated power. In the seventeenth century, and even in the early eighteenth century, it was not, therefore, with all its theatre of terror, a lingering hang-over from an earlier age. Its ruthlessness, its spectacle, its physical violence, its unbalanced play of forces, its meticulous ceremonial, its entire apparatus were inscribed in the political functioning of the penal system.

The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, aa power capable of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep.

If there is, in classical madness, something which refers elsewhere, and to other things, it is no longer because the madman comes from the world of the irrational and bears its stigmata; rather, it is because he crosses the frontiers of bourgeois order of his own accord, and alienates himself outside the sacred limits of its ethic.

one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination ...

Poder y placer no se anulan; no se vuelven el uno contra el otro; se persiguen, se encabalgan y reactivan. Se

la atención se ha desplazado, por el contrario, de las vastas unidades que se describían como "épocas" o "siglos", hacia fenómenos de ruptura.

A decadência da Europa nos oferece um espectáculo imenso cujos momentos mais fortes são omitidos ou são dispensados. O próprio da cena em que nos encontramos hoje é representar um teatro; sem monumentos que sejam nossa obra e que nos pertençam, nós vivemos cercados de cenários. Mas há mais: o europeu não sabe quem ele é; ele ignora que raças se misturam nele; ele procura que papel poderia ter; ele não tem individualidade.

In order to fix the vocabulary, let us say that we will call knowledge-connaissance the system that allows desire and knowledge-savoir to be given a prior unity, reciprocal belonging, and co-naturalness. And we will call knowledge-savoir that which we have to drag from the interiority of knowledge-connaissance in order to rediscover in it the object of a willing, the end of a desire, the instrument of a domination, the stake of a struggle.

The secret for harvesting from existence the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment is—to live it dangerously

De todos modos, nosotros no vemos nada, no vemos más que miradas, no un lugar sino un gesto, y siempre el gesto de las manos, las manos cerradas, las manos que se abren, las manos abiertas del todo.

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.

The apparent effect of truth which operates in the sophism is in reality a quasi-juridical bond between a discursive event and a speaking subject. Hence the fact that we find two theses in the Sophists: Everything is true (as soon as you say something, that thing exists.). Nothing is true (whatever words you employ, they never express what exists).

Naš je um razlika diskursa, naša istorija razlika vremena, naše ja razlika maski.

the intense Catholic renaissance during the Counter-Reformation produced in France a very particular character of simultaneous competition and complicity between the government and the Church.