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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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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
Things
Accepting
Assumptions
Rest
Critique
Saying
Practices
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Pointing
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Unconsidered
Right
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Unchallenged
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Accept
Modes

More quotes by 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.
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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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Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
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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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I'm not making a problem out of a personal question I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
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The soul is the prison of the body.
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Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
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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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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.
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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.
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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it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
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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.
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.
Michel Foucault
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Relations of power are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power.
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My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed.
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.
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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.
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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It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.
Michel Foucault