Quotes About Michel Foucault

In practice, Plato transposed the retreat from the city back into the city again and, in doing so, established a political-topological difference that would have a major effect on world history. To borrow Michel Foucault's term, the settlement of the Academy in the city was an issue of a "heterotopia

The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.

It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring.

Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history

Through Sade and Goya, the Western world received the possibility of transcending its reason in violence....

Menuret repeats an observation of Forestier's that clearly shows how an excessive loss of a humor, by drying out the vessels and fibers, may provoke a state of mania; this was the case of a young man who 'having married his wife in the summertime, became maniacal as a result of the excessive intercourse he had with her.

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.

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?

Time has its own viscosity, as Michel Foucault remarked. Ekstatic temporality embodies its flow.