Michel Foucault Quotes
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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.
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It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime.
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There are moments in life where the question of knowing whether one might think otherwise than one thinks and perceive otherwise than one sees is indispensable if one is to continue to observe or reflect... What is philosophy today... if it does not consist in, instead of legitimizing what we already know, undertaking to know how and how far it might be possible to think otherwise?
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At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
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People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.
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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.
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I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.
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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.
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It seems to me that the real political task in a society such as ours is to criticise the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticise and attack them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.
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I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
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Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
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In the Renaissance, madness was present everywhere and mingled with every experience by its images or its dangers. During the classical period, madness was shown, but on the other side of bars; if present, it was at a distance, under the eyes of a reason that no longer felt any relation to it and that would not compromise itself by too close a resemblance. Madness had become a thing to look at: no longer a monster inside oneself, but an animal with strange mechanisms, a bestiality from which man had long since been suppressed.
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Political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.
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One cannot attend to oneself, take care of oneself, without a relationship to another person.
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Where there is power, there is resistance.
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Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
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It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion; death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private.
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We are freer than we think.
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The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
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Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
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Visibility is a trap.
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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.
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Probably it's insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the State, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible; the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other.
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From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.