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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.

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
Promise
Relations
Resistances
Principles
Necessity
Heterogeneous
Term
Latter
Irreducible
Power
Resistance
Inscribed
Opposite
Lure
Opposites
Derive
Relation
Betrayed
Neither
Odd

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
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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.
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To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before
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To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.
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I think I have in fact been situated in most of the squares on the political checkerboard, one after another and sometimes simultaneously: as anarchist, leftist, ostentatious or disguised Marxist, nihilist, explicit or secret anti-Marxist, technocrat in the service of Gaullism, new liberal and so on.
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The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
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My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.
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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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The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.
Michel Foucault
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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.
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.
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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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Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
Michel Foucault
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Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do. Sexual behavior is more than that.
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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Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
Michel Foucault
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One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.
Michel Foucault
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Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.
Michel Foucault