Michel Foucault

“We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’... in fact power produces, it produces reality, it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”

“The work of an intellectual is not to form the political will of others; it is, through the analyses he does in his own domains, to bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions and, starting from that re-problemitisation (where he plays his specific role as intellectual) to take part in the formation of a political will (where he has his role to play as citizen).”

“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.”

“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”

“Discourse is not life; its time is not your time; in it, you will not be reconciled to death; you may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying you will make a man that will live longer than he.”

“The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of retaliation. It was the effect, in the rites of punishment, of a certain mechanism of power: of a power that not only did not hesitate to exert itself directly on bodies, but was exalted and strengthened by its visible manifestations; of a power that asserted itself as an armed power whose functions of maintaining order were not entirely unconnected with the functions of war; of a power that presented rules and obligations as personal bonds, a breach of which constituted an offence and called for vengeance; of a power for which disobedience was an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion, which is not in principle different from civil war; of a power that had to demonstrate not why it enforced its laws, but who were its enemies, and what unleashing of force threatened them; of a power which, in the absence of continual supervision, sought a renewal of its effect in the spectacle of its individual manifestations; of a power that was recharged in the ritual display of its reality as 'super-power'.”

“To all those who still wish to talk about man, about his reign or his liberation, to all those who still ask themselves questions about what man is in his essence, to all those who wish to take him as their starting-point in their attempts to reach the truth, to all those who, on the other hand, refer all knowledge back to the truths of man himself, to all those who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing, who refuse to mythologize without demystifying, who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking, to all these warped and twisted forms of reflection we can answer only with a philosophical laugh – which means, to a certain extent, a silent one.”

“The child is more individualised than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal and the non-delinquent. In each case, it is towards the first of these pairs that all the individualising mechanisms are turned in our civilisation and when one wishes to individualise the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of the child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing”

“אני גאה מאוד בכך שאנשים מסוימים סבורים כי אני מהווה סכנה לסטודנטים שלי. כאשר אנשים מתחילים לחשוב על בריאותה של הפעילות האינטלקטואלית, אני חושב שמשהו לא בסדר. בעיניהם אני מהווה אדם מסוכן היות שהם מאמינים כי אני נגוע במרקסיזם ובניהיליזם.”

“אינני חושב כי מן ההכרח שאדע את אשר אני מהווה. העניין העיקרי שבחיים ובעבודה הוא להפוך לאדם שונה מזה שהיית בתחילה. אם כאשר התחלת לכתוב ספר, ידעת את סופו, אולי לא היית כותב אותו. מה שנכון לגבי כתיבה ולגבי קשרי אהבה, נכון גם לגבי החיים. המשחק שווה את המאמץ כל עוד אין אנו יודעים את סופו. אני עוסק בהיסטוריה של המחשבה. האדם הוא יצור חושב.”

“הפסיכולוגיה לא תוכל לעולם לגלות את האמת בדבר השיגעון, כי השיגעון הוא אשר מחזיק באמת הפסיכולוגית.”

“הנפש היא הכלא של הגוף.”

“מה הפלא אם בתי הכלא דומים לבתי חרושת, לבתי ספר, לקסרקטינים ולבתי חולים, שכולם דומים לבתי כלא?”

“דבר אחד ודאי: האדם מעולם לא היווה את העיקרית שבבעיותיו העתיקות והתמידיות של הידע האנושי.”

“המדע של ימינו איננו עוד בבחינת ידע, אלא הפך לשדה התמחות ולמוסדות מחקר.”

“אֶת המַצָּב בְּאִירָאן אֶפְשָׁר לְהָבִין כְּדוּ-קְרָב גָּדוֹל תַּחַת סֵמֶל מָסוֹרָתִי — שֶׁל הַמֶּלֶךְ וְהַקָּדוֹשׁ, הַשַּׁלִּיט הַחָמוּשׁ וְהַגּוֹלֶה מְחֻסַּר-הַכֹּל, הָעָרִיץ מוּל הָאָדָם הַקָּם בִּידַיִם רֵיקוֹת — וְעַם שָׁלֵם מֵרִיעַ לוֹ.”

“אני אומן. אני בונה משהו שבסופו של דבר משרת מצור, מלחמה, הרס. אני לא בעד הרס, אבל אני בעד היכולת לעבור, היכולת להתקדם, היכולת להפיל חומות.”

“הפילוסופיה העתיקה מלמדת אותנו איך לקבל את מותנו, והפילוסופיה המודרנית – איך לקבל את מותו של זולתנו.”

“The game is worthwhile in so far as we don't know what will be the end.”

“The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. The monarchy presented itself as a referee, aa power capable of putting an end to war, violence, and pillage and saying no to these struggles and private feuds. It made itself acceptable by allocating itself a juridical and negative function, albeit one whose limits it naturally began at once to overstep.”