List of Michel Foucault Quotes

A Way Of Life Can Be Shared Among Individuals Of Different Ages, Status, And Social Activity. It Can Yield Intense Relations Not Resembling Those That Are Institutionalized. It Seems To Me That A Way Of Life Can Yield A Culture And An Ethics. To Be "gay," I Think, Is Not To Identify With The Psychological Traits And The Visible Masks Of The Homosexual But To Try And Define And Develop A Way Of Life.

Chance Does Not Speak Essentially Through Words Nor Can It Be Seen In Their Convolution. It Is The Eruption Of Language, Its Sudden Appearance. It's Not A Night Twinkle With Stars, An Illuminated Sleep, Nor A Drowsy Vigil. It Is The Very Edge Of Consciousness.

During The Years 1945-1965 (i Am Referring To Europe), There Was A Certain Way Of Thinking Correctly, A Certain Style Of Politicaldiscourse, A Certain Ethics Of The Intellectual. One Had To Be On Familiar Terms With Marx, Not Let One's Dreams Stray Too Far From Freud.... These Were Therequirements That Made The Strange Occupation Of Writing And Speaking A Measure Of Truth About Oneself And One's Time Acceptable.

The Court Is The Bureaucracy Of The Law. If You Bureaucratise Popular Justice Then You Give It The Form Of A Court.

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.

Where Can An Interrogation Lead Us Which Does Not Follow Reason In Its Horizontal Course, But Seeks To Retrace In Time That Constant Vertically Which Confronts European Culture With What It Is Not?

People Will Be Surprised At The Eagerness With Which We Went Aboutpretending To Rouse From Its Slumber A Sexuality Which Every­thing-our Discourses, Our Customs, Our Institutions, Our Regulations, Our Knowledges-was Busy Producing In The Light Of Day And Broadcasting To Noisy Accompaniment.

[john Boswell] Introduction Of The Concept Of "gay" (in The Way He Defines It) Provides Us Both With A Useful Instrument Of Research And At The Same Time A Better Comprehension Of How People Actually Conceive Of Themselves And Their Sexual Behavior.

I Think I Have In Fact Been Situated In Most Of The Squares On The Political Checkerboard, One After Another And Sometimes Simultaneously: As Anarchist, Leftist, Ostentatious Or Disguised Marxist, Nihilist, Explicit Or Secret Anti-marxist, Technocrat In The Service Of Gaullism, New Liberal And So On.

A Law Which Excludes All Dialectic And All Reconciliation; Which Establishes, Consequently, Both The Flawless Unity Of Knowledge And The Uncompromising Division Of Tragic Existence; It Rules Over A World Without Twilight, Which Knows No Effusion, Nor The Attenuated Cares Of Lyricism; Everything Must Be Either Waking Or Dream, Truth Or Darkness, The Light Of Being Or The Nothingness Of Shadow.

Confined On The Ship, From Which There Is No Escape, The Madman Is Delivered To The River With Its Thousand Arms, The Sea With Its Thousand Roads, To That Great Uncertainty External To Everything. He Is A Prisoner In The Midst Of What Is The Freest, The Openest Of Routes: Bound Fast At The Infinite Crossroads. He Is The Passenger Par Excellence: That Is, The Prisoner Of The Passage. And The Land He Will Come To Is Unknown—as Is, Once He Disembarks, The Land From Which He Comes. He Has His Truth And His Homeland Only In That Fruitless Expanse Between Two Countries That Cannot Belong To Him.

If I Won A Few Billion In The Lottery, I Would Create An Institute Where People Who Would Like To Die Would Come Spend A Weekend, A Week, Or A Month In Pleasure, Under Drugs Perhaps, In Order To Disappear Afterward, As If Erased.

One Can Say That The Author Is An Ideological Product, Since We Represent Him As The Opposite Of His Historically Real Function. (when A Historically Given Function Is Represented In A Figure That Inverts It, One Has An Ideological Production.) The Author Is Therefore The Ideological Figure By Which One Marks The Manner In Which We Fear The Proliferation Of Meaning.

We Must Uncover Our Rituals For What They Are: Completely Arbitrary Things, Tied To Our Bourgeois Way Of Life; It Isgood-and That Is The Real Theater-totranscend Them In The Manner Of Play, Bymeans Of Games And Irony; It Is Good To Be Dirty And Bearded, To Have Long Hair,to Look Like A Girl When One Is A Boy (and Vice Versa); One Must Put "inplay," Show Up, Transform And Reversethe Systems Which Quietly Order Us About.

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.

It Is One Of My Targets To Show People That A Lot Of Things That Are Part Of Their Landscape - That People Are Universal - Are The Result Of Some Very Precise Historical Changes. All My Analyses Are Against The Idea Of Universal Necessities In Human Existence. They Show The Arbitrariness Of Institutions And Show Which Space Of Freedom We Can Still Enjoy And How Many Changes Can Still Be Made.

On The Level Of Investigative Results, John Boswell's Methodology Has Led To The Discovery That What Has Been Called The Repression Of Homosexuality Does Not Date Back To Christianity Properly Speaking, But Developed Within The Christian Era At A Much Later Date. In This Type Of Analysis It Is Important To Be Aware Of The Way In Which People Conceived Of Their Own Sexuality.

If Those Arrangements [the Fundamental Arrangements Of Knowledge] Were To Disappear As They Appeared... Then One Can Certainly Wager That Man Would Be Erased, Like A Face Drawn In Sand At The Edge Of The Sea.

Resistances Do Not Derive From A Few Heterogeneous Principles; But Neither Are They A Lure Or A Promise That Is Of Necessity Betrayed. They Are The Odd Term In Relations Of Power; They Are Inscribed In The Latter As An Irreducible Opposite.

Matthey, A Geneva Physician Very Close To Rousseau's Influence, Formulates The Prospect For All Men Of Reason: 'do Not Glory In Your State, If You Are Wise And Civilized Men; An Instant Suffices To Disturb And Annihilate That Supposed Wisdom Of Which You Are So Proud; An Unexpected Event, A Sharp And Sudden Emotion Of The Soul Will Abruptly Change The Most Reasonable And Intelligent Man Into A Raving Idiot.

Today, Criminal Justice Functions And Justifies Itself Only By This Perpetual Reference To Something Other Than Itself, By This Unceasing Reinscription In Non-juridical Systems.

When Man Deploys The Arbitrary Nature Of His Madness, He Confronts The Dark Necessity Of The World; The Animal That Haunts His Nightmares And His Nights Of Privation Is His Own Nature, Which Will Lay Bare Hell's Pitiless Truth.

Psychoanalysis Can Unravel Some Of The Forms Of Madness; It Remains A Stranger To The Sovereign Enterprise Of Unreason. It Can Neither Limit Nor Transcribe, Nor Most Certainly Explain, What Is Essential In This Enterprise.

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.