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The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy the soul is the prison of the body

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
Soul
Anatomy
Instrument
Instruments
Effect
Prison
Effects
Political
Body

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it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
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The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government. Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated.
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Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
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We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.
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Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce.
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When man deploys the arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of the world the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth.
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Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.
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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.
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Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?
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A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
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Madness is the absolute break with the work of art it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
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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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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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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.
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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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What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
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Relations of power are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power.
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'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.
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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