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

More quotes by 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.
Michel Foucault
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In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, man's dispute with madness was dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge
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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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.
Michel Foucault
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Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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Political power goes much deeper than one suspects there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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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.
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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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.
Michel Foucault
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You know the difference between a real science and a pseudoscience? A real science recognizes and accepts its own history without feeling attacked. When you tell a psychiatrist his mental institution came from a lazar house, he becomes infuriated.
Michel Foucault
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It is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it death becomes the most secret aspect of existence, the most private.
Michel Foucault
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In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
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I'm not making a problem out of a personal question I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
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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Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
Michel Foucault
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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.
Michel Foucault
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You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.
Michel Foucault