Quotes from Michel Foucault

What I want to do is not the history of solutions, and that's the reason why I don't accept the word 'alternative'. I would like to do genealogy of problems, of problématiques. My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do.

From being the object of a religious experience and sanctified, poverty became the object of a moral conception that condemned

As mudanças económicas do século XVIII tornaram necessário fazer circular os efeitos do poder, por canais cada vez mais sutis, chegando até os próprios indivíduos, seus corpos, seus gestos, cada um de seus desempenhos cotidianos. Que o poder, mesmo tendo uma multiplicidade de homens a gerir, seja tão eficaz quanto se ele exercesse sobre um só.

The corollary of the possibility of conceiving other worlds - this one being, de facto, only a domain - is the impossibility of moving beyond the world we inhabit and the imperious necessity of accepting its frontiers as limits.

Liberty, far from putting man in possession of himself, ceaselessly alienates him from his essence and his world

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

The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.

It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that were have never said enough on the subject...where sex is concerned the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own.

That is not all, however: this relationship between writing and death is also manifested in the effacement of the writing subject's individual characteristics. Using all the contrivances that he steps up between himself and what he writes, the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result, the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more that the singularity of his absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.

Moreover, it is not entirely without significance that true love was, in Platonic philosophy -- but also, as you know, in a whole sector, a whole domain of Christian spirituality and mysticism -- the form par excellence of the true life. Since Platonism, true love and the true life have traditionally belonged together, and to a large extend Christian Platonism will take up this theme.

There has been so much action in the past," said D.H. Lawrence, "especially sexual action, a wearying repetition over and over, without a corresponding thought, a corresponding realization. Now our business is to realize sex. Today the full conscious realization of sex is even more important than the act itself.

I am not a professional historian: nobody is perfect.

A medida que el mundo llega a ser más profundo bajo la mirada, se advierte que todo lo que ha ejercitado la profundidad del hombre no era sino un juego de niños.

I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness.

Do not acid vapors have the very properties of melancholia, whereas alcoholic vapors, always ready to burst into flame, suggest frenzy; and sulfurous vapors, agitated by a violent and continuous movement, indicate mania?

How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?

It should be possible to discuss what I have put forward. Sometimes, when it has not been a good lecture, it would need very little, just one question, to put everything straight. However, this question never comes. The group effect in France makes any genuine discussion impossible. And as there is no feedback, the course is theatricalized. My relationship with the people there is like that of an actor or an acrobat. And when I have finished speaking, a sensation of total solitude ...

En una sociedad como la nuestra son bien conocidos los procedimientos de exclusión. El más evidente, y el más familiar también, es lo prohibido.

Modifying one's s own thought and that of others seems to me to be the intellectual's reason for being

soÌ"phrosyneÌ", el estado al que tendemos, mediante el ejercicio del autocontrol y mediante la moderación en la práctica de los placeres, está caracterizada como una libertad.

Kafamda doÄŸruluÄŸunu kan?tlad???m bir ÅŸey olduÄŸu için yazm?yorum. Yazmak, baÅŸta fark edemediÄŸim bir ÅŸeyi sonunda bulmam? saÄŸl?yor.

other hand, any act constitutive of signification

In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king... we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

Our philanthropy prefers to. recognize the signs of a benevolence. toward sickness where there is only a. condemnation of idleness