Michel Foucault Quotes

Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.

We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.

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.

Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.

Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

[…] marginile unei cărţi nu sunt niciodată clar şi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri şi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraţia sa internă şi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărţi, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reţea.

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.

I am hopelessly in love with a memory.
An echo from another time, another place.

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.

What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?

Sviluppate la vostra legittima stranezza.

Where there is power, there is resistance.

There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

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.

The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.

[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. Where there is desire, the power relation is already present: an illusion, then, to denounce this relation for a repression exerted after the event.

Le fou ce ne sera plus l’exilé, celui qu’on repousse dans les marges de nos villes, mais celui qu’on rend étranger à lui même en le culpabilisant d’être celui qu’il est.

Visibility is a trap.