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

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But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
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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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If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.
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Where there is power, there is resistance.
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At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
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Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
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In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
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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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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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The best moment of love is when the lover leaves in the taxi.
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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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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.
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...if you are not like everybody else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal , then you are sick. These three categories, not being like everybody else, not being normal and being sick are in fact very different but have been reduced to the same thing
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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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One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.
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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.
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The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.
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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.
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And now, if we try to assign a value, in and of itself, outside its relations to the dream and with error, to classical unreason, we must understand it not as reason diseased, or as reason lost or alienated, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
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Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
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