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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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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
Function
Justifies
Justice
Reference
Today
Functions
Something
Criminal
Perpetual
Justify
Systems
Criminals
Unceasing

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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.
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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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I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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Believe what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
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To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.
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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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Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
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To work is to undertake to think something other than what one has thought before
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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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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.
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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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there is no glory in punishing
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'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.
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I don't write a book so that it will be the final word I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.
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Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do. Sexual behavior is more than that.
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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.
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