Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Michel Foucault

Image
In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge
Michel Foucault
Image
Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
Michel Foucault
Image
If I won a few billion in the lottery, I would create an institute where people who would like to die would come spend a weekend, a week, or a month in pleasure, under drugs perhaps, in order to disappear afterward, as if erased.
Michel Foucault
Image
Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
Michel Foucault
Image
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
Michel Foucault
Image
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
Image
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
Michel Foucault
Image
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad. If everything is dangerous, then we always have something to do. So my position leads not to apathy but to hyper - and pessimistic - activism.
Michel Foucault
Image
Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.
Michel Foucault
Image
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.
Michel Foucault
Image
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Michel Foucault
Image
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
Image
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
Image
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.
Michel Foucault
Image
To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.
Michel Foucault
Image
Methodologically speaking, the rejection by [John] Boswell of the categorical opposition between homosexual and heterosexual, which plays such a significant role in the way our culture conceives of homosexuality, represents an advance not only in scholarship but in cultural criticism as well.
Michel Foucault
Image
The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.
Michel Foucault
Image
There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
Michel Foucault
Image
Power is not an institution, and not a structure neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Michel Foucault
Image
The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
Michel Foucault