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It's not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching the power of truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic and cultural, within which it operates at the present time

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
Time
Within
Hegemony
Social
Operates
Form
Cultural
Truth
Forms
Power
Already
Matter
Present
Detaching
Every
System
Emancipating
Would
Economic
Chimera

More quotes by Michel Foucault

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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.
Michel Foucault
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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 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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it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
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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.
Michel Foucault
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The soul is the prison of the body.
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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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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
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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.
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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The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.
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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'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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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