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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.

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
Art
Abolition
Form
Absolutes
Truth
Madness
Work
Absolute
Time
Forms
Break
Moment
Constitutive
Moments
Dissolves

More quotes by 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
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I don't write a book so that it will be the final word I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.
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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.
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I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
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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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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.
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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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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.
Michel Foucault
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The gaze that sees is the gaze that dominates.
Michel Foucault
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Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault
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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
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I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Michel Foucault
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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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Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
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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