Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucaultwas a French philosopher, historian of ideas, social theorist, philologist and literary critic. His theories addressed the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions. Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these labels, preferring to present his thought as a critical history of modernity. His thought has been highly influential both for academic and for activist groups, such as within post-anarchism...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth15 October 1926
CountryFrance
exercise discovery knowledge-and-power
We should not be content to say that power has a need for such-and-such a discovery, such-and-such a form of knowledge, but we should add that the exercise of power itself creates and causes to emerge new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. ... The exercise of power perpetually creates knowledge and, conversely, knowledge constantly induces effects of power. ... It is not possible for power to be exercised without knowledge, it is impossible for knowledge not to engender power.
growing-up knowledge order
To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.
knowledge-and-power thanks economy
Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power."
knowledge might essentials
It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
practice theory theory-of-knowledge
[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.
order law knowledge-and-power
... we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. Power constantly asks questions and questions us; it constantly investigates and records; it institutionalizes the search for the truth, professionalizes it, and rewards it. ... In a different sense, we are also subject to the truth in the sense that truth lays down the law: it is the discourse of truth that decides, at least in part; it conveys and propels effects of power.
knowledge-and-power regulation truth-is
'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth.
archeology easily english-historian man perhaps
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
dark prison zone
Little information is published on prisons, it is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life.
believe castration sedentary
Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
night vanity light
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
punishment guilty-person target
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
animal men political
For millenia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his exitence as a living being in question.
daylight brightness reason
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.