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
Let us ask...how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc....we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc. We should try to grasp subjection in its material instance as a constitution of subjects.
And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
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 what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
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.
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.
Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.
There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
Freedom of conscience entails more dangers than authority and despotism.
At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.