Quotes About Foucault

Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.

I was a voracious reader, but after Hannah's death I grew insatiable. Books became my milk and honey. I made myself feel better by reciting jejune statements like 'Books are the air I breathe,' or, worse, 'Life is meaningless without literature,' all in a weak attempt to avoid the fact that I found the world inexplicable and impenetrable. Compared to the complexity of understanding grief, reading Foucault or Blanchot is like perusing a children's picture book.

And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords.

A los académicos les encanta la teoría de Foucault que identifica conocimiento y poder y que insiste en que la fuerza bruta ya no era un factor primordial en el control social. Les gusta porque les favorece: es la fórmula perfecta para aquellos que quieren verse a sí mismos como políticos radicales aunque se limitan a escribir ensayos que apenas leerán una docena de personas en un ámbito institucional

In der Tat ist Foucaults Werk ein verwirrendes Labyrinth, in welchem der Autor, der keiner sein will und in Wahrheit nie das ist, was er zunächst zu sein scheint, umherirrt und sich verliert.

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

The common law of England is proof that there is a real distinction between legitimate and illegitimate power, that power can exist without oppression, and that authority is a living force in human conduct. English law, I discovered, is the answer to Foucault.

Nevertheless for a certain type of person who is intent on finding blame rather than forgiveness in the world, Foucault

Concept-work as I conceive it demands "mobile thought," Foucault's term, in advocating an "ethics of discomfort.

Butler [Judith Butler] elaborates Foucault's argument about the operations of power and resistance in order to demonstrate the ways in which marginalised identities are complicit with those identificatory regimes they seek to counter

Foucault calculated that the number of degrees through which the pendulum's plane of oscillation would shift in twenty-four hours would be 360 degrees times the sine of the latitude—which thus provided a way to determine the person's north-south location on the globe.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

Foucault was the one person I met in France that I could talk to. He was a mensch. You know whether you agree with him or not because you know what he is saying.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be underconstant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway." "But how do you know who's a watcher and who's a prisoner?"... "That's the point. Even the watchers are prisoners.

There was this philosopher-slash-historian called Foucault, who wrote about how society is like this legendary prison called the panopticon. In the panopticon, you might be under constant observation, except you can never be sure whether someone is watching or not, so you wind up following the rules anyway.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

The time for argument was over: Foucault wanted to crush an enemy, even though he claimed he loathed this kind of attack, in one of his last interviews.*

Nossos atuais neo-historicistas, com sua curiosa mistura de Foucault e Marx, são apenas um episódio bem menor na interminável história do platonismo. Platão esperava, banindo o poeta, banir também o tirano. Banir Shakespeare, ou antes reduzi-lo a seus contextos, não vai livrar-nos de nossos tiranos.

I rehearsed Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us the life we live is only one among several human possibilities.

If an individual is completely isolated, but most important, completely visible, says Foucault, then power functions automatically. "[T]he surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; [ . . .] the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary.

We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.

madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.

It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.

Hermann Boerhaave still defined melancholia as merely a long persistent delirium without fever, during which the sufferer is obsessed by only one thought.