The 90 best phrases of Michel Foucault

Paul-Michel Foucault, known as Michel Foucault, was one of the most emblematic social psychologists of the 20th century, in addition to being a French philosopher, theorist and professor acclaimed for his studies, especially those focused on the relationship of power and knowledge, as well as human sexuality.

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Famous quotes from Michel Foucault

To remember his contributions to the world of psychology and philosophy, we bring below the 90 best phrases of Michel Foucault about his work.

1. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else than you were at the beginning.

Every day we must improve ourselves.

2. Freedom of thought brings more dangers than authority and despotism.

Thoughts have the ability to change our life.

3. Discipline is one thing and sovereignty is another.

Being disciplined has nothing to do with dominance.

4. People know what they are doing; they often know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what they do.

We know what we are doing, but we don't know why.

5. Knowing is the only space of freedom of being.

Knowledge is the only thing that makes man free.

6. Nothing of economic knowledge can be understood if one does not know how power and economic power were exercised in their daily lives.

He refers to economic issues.

7. I am not a prophet, my job is to build windows where before there was only wall.

Michel Foucault's job was to help people find a solution even when it was difficult.

8. Do not ask me who I am, or ask me to remain the same.

People are constantly changing.

9. The characteristic of knowing is not seeing or demonstrating, but interpreting.

We must be able to interpret what we learn.

10. Sex police: that is, not the rigor of a prohibition but the need to regulate sex through useful and public discourses.

Words about the way of seeing sex in society.

11. It is ugly to be worthy of punishment, but inglorious to punish.

Don't do to others what you don't want them to do to you.

12. Where there is power, there is resistance to power.

Not everyone agrees with power.

13. The law is not born of nature, next to the springs frequented by the first shepherds; the law is born from the real battles, the victories, the massacres, the conquests that have their date and their horror heroes.

Laws are born to protect people from evil acts.

14. Religious beliefs prepare a kind of landscape of images, a favorable illusory medium for every hallucination and every delusion.

Religious beliefs can lead to fanaticism to ensure any supernatural event.

15. I don't think it is necessary to know exactly what I am.

We change every day and, with it, who we are.

16. Man and vanity move the world.

Vanity rules man and both the world.

17. Power, far from hindering knowledge, produces it.

Power generates knowledge.

18. The history of the struggles for power, and consequently the real conditions of its exercise and its maintenance, remains almost totally hidden. Knowledge does not enter into it: that should not be known.

A reference on the dark side of the abuse of power.

19. Madness cannot be found in the wild.

To be crazy you have to live surrounded by madness.

20. Each individual must lead her life in such a way that others can respect and admire her.

Live in such a way that you earn the respect and admiration of others.

21. If sex is repressed, that is, destined for prohibition, non-existence and silence, the just talking about him, and talking about his repression, has an air of transgression deliberate.

Even today, talking about sex is taboo.

22. The individual is the product of power.

Man is the result of great power that is exercised in him, in every way.

23. I do not write a book to be the last. I write so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.

Make way for others to follow your example.

24. Knowledge is power.

If you have knowledge, you are a powerful person.

25. What surprises me is the fact that in our society, art has become something that relates only to objects and not to individuals or life.

Life is an art. Like people.

26. Social practices can lead to engender domains of knowing that not only make new objects appear, concepts and techniques, but also make appear entirely new forms of subjects and subjects of knowledge.

What society dictates will affect our way of seeing things.

27. Why should the lamp or the house be objects of art and not our own life?

We always see things as artistic and we don't see life that way.

28. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?

Life is a blank canvas and our art comes from our actions.

29. The most disarmed tenderness, as well as the bloodiest of powers, need confession.

These two expressions are so dangerous that they require confession.

30. Popular movements have been presented as produced by hunger, taxes, unemployment; never as a struggle for power, as if the masses could dream of eating well, but not of exercising power.

Anyone can come to power, not just the upper class.

31. Any education system is a political way of maintaining or modifying the adequacy of discourses, with the knowledge and powers that they imply.

It refers to the way in which education has become politicized.

32. Madness does not exist except in a society, it does not exist outside the forms of sensibility that isolate it and the forms of repulsion that exclude or capture it.

Values ​​in a society are important.

33. You have to be a hero to face the morality of the time.

It is almost an act of rebellion to challenge the extreme morals of society.

34. Globally, one can get the impression that sex is hardly ever talked about.

Although it is already seen as part of human nature, there is still a lot of silence regarding sexual practices.

35. In our days, history tends towards archeology, towards the intrinsic description of the monument.

We pay more attention to monuments than to the people themselves.

36. Perhaps the goal today is not to discover what we are, but to reject what we are.

We can disagree with what we are today.

37. The same subject of knowledge has a history.

We all have a story to tell.

38. It would be hypocritical or naive to think that the law was made by everyone and on behalf of everyone.

Unfortunately, there are times when the law benefits only a specific population.

39. Knowledge is not to know: knowledge is to cut.

Through knowledge we can end ignorance.

40. Language is at the same time the whole fact of the accumulated speech in history and also the system of language itself.

Being able to express yourself through speech is a great thing.

41. Visibility is a trap.

If we let see something of our life, we are subjected to a lot of criticism.

42. Is it any wonder that the prison resembles factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, all of which resemble prisons?

You can feel like a prisoner anywhere.

43. Man is an invention whose recent date easily shows the archeology of our thinking.

Man is the reflection of his thoughts.

44. Prisons, hospitals and schools have similarities because they serve the primary intention of civilization: coercion.

A reference to the union of people behind the demands.

45. Just take a look at the architectural devices, the disciplinary regulations and the entire internal organization: sex is always present.

Sex is a main figure in every civilization.

46. The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to multiply ruptures and search for all the bristles of discontinuity.

Everything that leads man to grow intellectually is also the cause of many controversies.

47. From the point of view of wealth, there is no distinction between need, comfort, and pleasure.

A critique of the whim that arises in rich people.

48. The look that sees is the look that dominates.

A clean look is always captivating.

49. It must be admitted that power produces knowledge; that power and knowledge directly implicate each other; that there is no power relationship without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge or knowledge that does not suppose and does not constitute power relations at the same time.

Power and knowledge go hand in hand.

50. If you are not like everyone else, then you are abnormal, if you are abnormal, then you are sick.

The definition of abnormal has many meanings.

51. For the State to function as it does, it is necessary that there be from the man to the woman or from the adult to the child very specific domination relations that have their own configuration and their relative autonomy.

The power of the state lies in the domain.

52. Humanism is everything through which the desire for power in the West has been obstructed - forbidden to want power, excluded the possibility of taking it.

One of Foucault's characteristic reflections.

53. Power, in short, is exercised more than it is possessed.

If power is not exercised effectively, it leads nowhere.

54. All modern thought is permeated by the idea of ​​thinking the impossible.

Today we can think of doing things that are almost impossible to do.

55. The sodomite was a relapse, the homosexual is now a species.

It refers to the way homosexuals were called before.

56. Whereas history itself, history simply, seems to erase, to the benefit of the firmer structures, the irruption of events.

History does not contemplate many of the events that have occurred.

57. The age of enlightenment which discovered freedoms, also invented disciplines.

When enlightenment arrived, freedom and rules also came.

58. Only what never stops hurting remains in the memory.

Difficult situations tend to live forever in our minds.

59. I am happy with my life, but not so much with myself.

We can appreciate life, but not who we are.

60. There is no glory in punishment.

Punishing someone is not satisfying at all.

61. If you knew when you started a book what you would say at the end, do you think you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is also true for life.

We don't know what the end will be like, we just have to live.

62. Discourse is not simply that which translates struggles or systems of domination, but rather that for which, and through which one fights, that power that one wants to seize.

There are people who want, through his speech, to take over us.

63. The 'psychiatrization' of everyday life, if examined closely, would possibly reveal the invisible of power.

Life is difficult to analyze.

64. Prison is the only place where power can manifest itself nakedly, in its most excessive dimensions, and justify itself as moral power.

Not only in prison can we feel captive.

65. Sade goes to the extreme of classical discourse and thought. He reigns exactly on the edge of him.

A reference to the Marquis de Sade.

66. The soul, the illusion of theologians, has not been replaced by a real man, an object of knowledge, of philosophical reflection or of technical intervention.

The spirit is the fundamental thing that man has.

67. It's fascinating how much people like to judge.

We are agile to judge others.

68. Power and pleasure are not annulled; they do not turn against each other; they chase each other, harness and reactivate.

It refers to the pleasure that power gives and the power that pleasure gives.

69. There are forms of oppression and domination that become invisible; the new normal.

There are ways to exercise domination and oppression without being noticed.

70. The game is worth it to the extent that we do not know where it will end.

Life is like a game since we don't know when the end will come.

71. What is it that makes literature literature? What is it that makes the language that is written there on a book literature? It is that kind of prior ritual that traces its space of consecration in words.

It refers to the sacredness that is for a writer, to carry out his work.

72. Sexuality is part of our behavior, it is one more element of our freedom.

Sexuality is something that is in us and that we cannot do without.

73. Put someone in prison, lock him up, deprive him of food, heat, prevent him from leaving, make love... etc., there is the manifestation of the most delusional power imaginable.

Deprivation of liberty is the worst punishment of all.

74. The important thing is that sex was not only a matter of sensation and pleasure, of law or prohibition, but also of truth and falsehood.

Sex has many faces.

75. Traditionally, power is what is seen, what is shown, what is manifested, and, paradoxically, it finds the principle of its force in the movement by which it unfolds.

Power manifests itself in various ways on a daily basis.

76. The intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.

Intellectuals are criticized for sharing their knowledge.

77. For two decades I have lived in a state of passion with a person; It is something that is beyond love, reason, everything; I can only call it passion.

Passion is fundamental within couples.

78. I have not tried to write about the history of that language, but about the archeology of that silence.

Saying nothing is also a form of expression.

79. The real political task in a society like ours is to criticize the functioning of institutions that appear to be neutral and independent.

We must always criticize government entities.

80. True reason is not free from all commitment to madness; on the contrary, he must follow the paths that it points out to him.

In all truth there is something of madness.

81. Power has entered the body, it is exposed in the body itself ...

Every person can be seduced by power.

82. The truth of sex has become essential, useful or dangerous, precious or fearful; in short, that sex has been constituted as a gamble in the game of truth.

Sex is part of who we are and our intimacy.

83. We need strategic maps, combat maps, because we are in permanent war, and peace is, in that sense, the worst of battles, the most sneaky and the meanest.

We are always in one way or another at war.

84. Justice must always question itself.

Justice has its negative side.

85. As the world becomes deeper under the gaze, it is realized that everything that has exercised the depth of man was nothing but child's play.

Man has lived in the world as if it were a game.

86. In politics and social analysis, we have not yet cut off the king's head.

He refers to the subject of politics and social justice.

87. Schools have the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions: define, classify, control and regulate people.

According to him, schools seek to change, monitor and limit people.

88. When the confession is not spontaneous or imposed by some inner imperative, it is torn away; it is discovered in the soul or it is torn from the body.

There are confessions that serve to judge us, according to the beliefs of others.

89. A criticism is not to say that things are not as good as they are. It consists of seeing what kinds of assumptions, familiar notions, established and unexamined ways of thinking are based on accepted practices.

Criticisms may not be well accepted.

90. Doesn't our difficulty in finding the right forms of struggle come from the fact that we still don't know what power consists of?

Many times we fight improperly.