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Psychoanalysis can unravel some of the forms of madness it remains a stranger to the sovereign enterprise of unreason. It can neither limit nor transcribe, nor most certainly explain, what is essential in this enterprise.

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
Mišel Fuko
Form
Stranger
Unravel
Essential
Psychiatry
Essentials
Psychoanalysis
Forms
Sovereign
Neither
Limit
Remains
Enterprise
Limits
Explain
Transcribe
Certainly
Madness
Unreason

More quotes by 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.
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Where there is power, there is resistance.
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there is no glory in punishing
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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.
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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.
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Madness designates the equinox between the vanity of night's hallucinations and the non-being of light's judgments.
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People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.
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The soul is the prison of the body.
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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.
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Are the prisons overpopulated, or is the population over-imprisoned ?
Michel Foucault
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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.
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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In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
Michel Foucault
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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.
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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Perhaps [transgression] is like a flash of lightning in the night which, from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies, which lights up the night from the inside, from top to bottom, yet owes to the dark the stark clarity of its manifestation, its harrowing and poised singularity.
Michel Foucault
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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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Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
Michel Foucault
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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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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