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The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

Michel Foucault

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Michel Foucault
Age: 57 †
Born: 1926
Born: October 15
Died: 1984
Died: June 26
Anthropologist
Ethnologist
Historian
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Professor
Psychologist
Screenwriter
Sociologist
Writer
Foucault
Michael Foucault
MiĊĦel Fuko
Popular
Court
Justice
Law
Form
Give
Giving
Bureaucracy

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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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
Michel Foucault
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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.
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Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
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What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
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Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence.
Michel Foucault
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I'm not making a problem out of a personal question I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Michel Foucault
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I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Michel Foucault
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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.
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The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy the soul is the prison of the body
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The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
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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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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
Michel Foucault
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The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.
Michel Foucault
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But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Michel Foucault
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Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity.
Michel Foucault
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I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
Michel Foucault
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I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.
Michel Foucault
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Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
Michel Foucault
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I believe that political power exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions which look as if they have nothing in common with the political power, and as if they are independent of it, while they are not.
Michel Foucault
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We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.
Michel Foucault