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In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

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
Essentially
Punishment
Function
Power
Different
Curing
Educating
Punish

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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If those arrangements [the fundamental arrangements of knowledge] were to disappear as they appeared... then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
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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.
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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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From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
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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.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
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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.
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Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse.
Michel Foucault
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The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
Michel Foucault
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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.
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Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
Michel Foucault
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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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To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.
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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It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
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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'Truth' is to be understood as a system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements. 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth.
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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Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
Michel Foucault