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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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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
Part
Substantial
Power
Mechanism
Mask
Hide
Condition
Conditions
Proportional
Ability
Mechanisms
Success
Tolerable

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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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I belong to that generation who, as students, had before their eyes, and were limited by, a horizon consisting of Marxism, phenomenology and existentialism. For me the break was first Beckett's Waiting for Godot, a breathtaking performance.
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There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations
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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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The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy the soul is the prison of the body
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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 don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
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Resistances do not derive from a few heterogeneous principles but neither are they a lure or a promise that is of necessity betrayed. They are the odd term in relations of power they are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite.
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Where there is power, there is resistance.
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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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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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Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
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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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[L]et us say that we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are forced to tell the truth, we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it.
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Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.
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It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
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The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
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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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We demand that sex speak the truth and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.
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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.
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