The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten. Michel de Certeau More Quotes by Michel de Certeau More Quotes From Michel de Certeau The sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated... He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress. Michel de Certeau sick secret men Along with the lazy man... the dying man is the immoral man: the former, a subject that does not work; the latter, an object that no longer even makes itself available to be worked on by others. Michel de Certeau lazy-man men death Can the vast technology beneath our gaze be anything but a representation? Any optical artifact... The city panorama is a theoretical (ie visual) simulacrum: in short, a picture, of which the preconditions for feasibility are forgetfulness and a misunderstanding of processes. Michel de Certeau technology cities process Political organizations have slowly substituted themselves for the Churches as the places of believing practices, but for this very reason, they seem to have been haunted by the return of a very ancient (preChristian) and very “pagan” alliance between power and religion. It is as though now that religion has ceased to be an autonomous power (the “power of religion,” people used to say), politics has once again become religious. Michel de Certeau religious practice believe When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses […]. ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said. Michel de Certeau subtle dancer stories The sick man is taken away by the institution that takes charge not of the individual, but of his illness, an isolated object transformed or eliminated by technicians devoted to the defense of health the way others are attached to the defense of law and order or tidiness. Michel de Certeau taken men order As a first approximation, I define belief not as the object of believing (a dogma, a program, etc.) but as the subject's investment in a proposition, the act of saying it and considering it as true. Michel de Certeau etc believe firsts
