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What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

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
Peculiar
Sexuality
Speaking
Infinitum
Shadow
Consigned
Sex
Exploiting
Modern
Ads
Existence
Societies
Secret
Dedicated

More quotes by 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.
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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
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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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What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
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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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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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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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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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Madness, in its wild, untamable words, proclaims its own meaning in its chimeras, it utters its secret truth.
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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.
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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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At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
Michel Foucault
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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?
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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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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In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Michel Foucault
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Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?
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I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
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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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There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
Michel Foucault