If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost. Michel Foucault More Quotes by Michel Foucault More Quotes From Michel Foucault Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power. Michel Foucault errors truth science ... 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. Michel Foucault knowledge-and-power law order A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy. Michel Foucault criticism practice thinking What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself? Michel Foucault given desire men I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem. Michel Foucault personal-question problem absence Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry. Michel Foucault medicine support political 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. Michel Foucault independent fighting real The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates. Michel Foucault Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate or enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is in itself an action-a perilous act. Michel Foucault alarms levels done There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think. Michel Foucault struggle book thinking Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. Michel Foucault target refuse Power is everywhere...because it comes from everywhere. Michel Foucault power One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character. Michel Foucault power exercise character The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated. Michel Foucault struggle men war 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. Michel Foucault power desire trying The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body Michel Foucault political body soul there is no glory in punishing Michel Foucault glory To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before Michel Foucault thinking I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me. Michel Foucault finals writing book Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret. Michel Foucault truth philosophy death
