Michel Foucault - Quotes
...a number of
phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of
mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human
species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of
power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century,
modern western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact
that human beings are a species. This is roughly what I have called biopower.
Foucault, Michel and Graham Burchell (Translator). Security, Territory, Population. 1977-78.
Power is not founded
on itself or generated by itself. Or we could say, more simply, that there
are not first of all relations of production and then, in addition, alongside
or on top of these relations, mechanisms of power that modify or disturb
them, or make them more consistent, coherent, or stable.
Foucault, Michel and Graham Burchell (Translator). Security, Territory, Population. 1977-78.
I think this serious and fundamental
relation between struggle and truth, the dimension in which philosophy
has developed for centuries and centuries, only dramatizes itself, becomes
emaciated, and loses its meaning and effectiveness in polemics within
theoretical discourse. So in all of this I will therefore propose only one
imperative, but it will be categorical and unconditional: Never engage in
polemics.
Foucault, Michel and Graham Burchell (Translator). Security, Territory, Population. 1977-78.
When one
undertakes to correct a prisoner, someone who has been sentenced, one tries to correct the person according to the risk of relapse, of recidivism,
that is to say according to what will very soon be called dangerousness –
that is to say, again, a mechanism of security.
Foucault, Michel and Graham Burchell (Translator). Security, Territory, Population. 1977-78.
Sovereignty is exercised
within the borders of a territory, discipline is exercised on the bodies of
individuals, and security is exercised over a whole population.
Foucault, Michel and Graham Burchell (Translator). Security, Territory, Population. 1977-78.
scarcity is a state of
food shortage that has the property of engendering a process that renews
it and, in the absence of another mechanism halting it, tends to extend it
and make it more acute. It is a state of scarcity, in fact, that raises prices.
Foucault, Michel and Graham Burchell (Translator). Security, Territory, Population. 1977-78.
...man’s evil nature will have an influence on
scarcity by figuring as one of its sources, inasmuch as men’s greed – their
need to earn, their desire to earn even more, their egoism – causes the
phenomena of hoarding, monopolization, and withholding merchandise,
which intensify the phenomena of scarcity.
Foucault, Michel and Graham Burchell (Translator). Security, Territory, Population. 1977-78.
...we can say that today's writing has freed itself from the theme of
expression. Referring only to itself; but without being restricted to the confines of
its interiority, writing is identified with its own unfolded exteriority.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
Writing unfolds like a game [jeu] that
invariably goes beyond its own rules and transgresses its limits. 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.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
Our culture has metamorphosed this idea of narrative, or writing, as something
designed to ward off death. Writing has become linked to sacrifice, even to the
sacrifice of life: it is now a voluntary effacement that does not need to be
represented in books, since it is brought about in the writer's very existence.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
Using all the contrivances that he sets up between himself and what he writes,
the writing subject cancels out the signs of his particular individuality. As a result,
the mark of the writer is reduced to nothing more than the singularity of his
absence; he must assume the role of the dead man in the game of writing.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
It is a very familiar thesis that the task of
criticism is not to bring out the work's relationships with the author, nor to
reconstruct through the text a thought or experience, but rather to analyze the
work through its structure, its architecture, its intrinsic form, and the play of its
internal relationships.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
The notion of writing, as
currently employed, is concerned with neither the act of writing nor the indication
– be it symptom or sign – of a meaning that someone might have wanted to
express. We try, with great effort, to imagine the general condition of each text,
the condition of both the space in which it is dispersed and the time in which it
unfolds. In current usage, however
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
To admit that writing is, because
of the very history that it made possible, subject to the test of oblivion and
repression, seems to represent, in transcendental terms, the religious principle of
the hidden meaning (which requires interpretation) and the critical principle of
implicit signification, silent determinations, and obscured contents (which give
rise to commentary).
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
The proper name and the author's
name are situated between the two poles of description and designation: they
must have a certain link with what they name, but one that is neither entirely in
the mode of designation nor in that of description; it must be a specific link.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
These differences may result from the fact that an author's name is not simply an
element in a discourse (capable of being either subject or object, of being
replaced by a pronoun, and the like); it performs a certain role with regard to
narrative discourse, assuring a classificatory function.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
The author's name
manifests the appearance of a certain discursive set and indicates the status of
this discourse within a society and a culture. It has no legal status, nor is it
located in the fiction of the work; rather, it is located in the break that founds a
certain discursive construct and its very particular mode of being.
Foucault, Michel and Josué V. Harari (Translator). What Is an Author? 1969.
The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is first
perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world,
whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to
unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in
the forms of madness.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
A fundamental conversion of the world of images: the constraint
of a multiplied meaning liberates that world from the control of
form. So many diverse meanings are established beneath the surface
of the image that it presents only an enigmatic face.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
When man deploys the
arbitrary nature of his madness, he confronts the dark necessity of
the world; the animal that haunts his nightmares and his nights of
privation is his own nature, which will lay bare hell's pitiless truth;
the vain images of blind idiocy—such are the world's Magna
Scientia; and already, in this disorder, in this mad universe, is
prefigured what will be the cruelty of the finale.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
Then the last type of madness: that of desperate passion. Love
disappointed in its excess, and especially love deceived by the
fatality of death, has no other recourse but madness. As long as there
was an object, mad love was more love than madness; left to itself, it
pursues itself in the void of delirium.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
Tamed, madness preserves all the appearances of its reign. It now
takes part in the measures of reason and in the labor of truth. It plays
on the surface of things and in the glitter of daylight, over all the
workings of appearances, over the ambiguity of reality and illusion,
over all that indeterminate web, ever rewoven and broken, which
both unites and separates truth and appearance.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
Confinement, that massive phenomenon, the signs of which are
found all across eighteenth-century Europe, is a "police" matter.
Police, in the precise sense that the classical epoch gave to it—that
is, the totality of measures which make work possible and necessary
for all those who could not live without it...
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
We have now got in the habit of perceiving in madness a fall into
a determinism where all forms of liberty are gradually suppressed;
madness shows us nothing more than the natural constants of a
determinism, with the sequences of its causes, and the discursive
movement of its forms; for madness threatens modern man only
with that return to the bleak world of beasts and things, to their
fettered freedom.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
Before Descartes, and long after his influence as philosopher and
physiologist had diminished, passion continued to be the meeting
ground of body and soul; the point where the latter's activity makes
contact with the former's passivity, each being a limit imposed upon
the other and the locus of their communication.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
If the passions are possible only in a being which has a
body, and a body not entirely subject to the light of its mind and to
the immediate transparence of its will, this is true insofar as, in
ourselves and without ourselves, and generally in spite of ourselves,
the mind's movements obey a mechanical structure which is that of
the movement of spirits.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
Madness, then, was not merely one of the possibilities afforded by
the union of soul and body; it was not just one of the consequences
of passion. Instituted by the unity of soul and body, madness turned
against that unity and once again put it in question. Madness, made
possible by passion, threatened by a movement proper to itself what
had made passion itself possible.
Foucault, Michel and Richard Howard (Translator). Madness and Civilization. 1964.
For us, the human body defines, by natural right, the space of origin
and of distribution of disease: a space whose lines, volumes, surfaces,
and routes are laid down, in accordance with a now familiar
geometry, by the anatomical atlas.
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
The exact superposition of the ‘body’ of the disease and the body
of the sick man is no more than a historical, temporary datum.
Their encounter is self-evident only for us, or, rather, we are only
just beginning to detach ourselves from it.
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
Knowledge is
historical that circumscribes pleurisy by its four phenomena: fever,
difficulty in breathing, coughing, and pains in the side. Knowledge
would be philosophical that called into question the origin, the
principle, the causes of the disease: cold, serous discharge,
inflammation of the pleura. The distinction between the historical
and the philosophical is not the distinction between cause and effect...
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
Disease is perceived fundamentally in a space of projection
without depth, of coincidence without development. There is only
one plane and one moment. The form in which truth is originally
shown is the surface in which relief is both manifested and
abolished—the portrait...
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
It is a space in which analogies define essences. The pictures
resemble things, but they also resemble one another. The distance
that separates one disease from another can be measured only by the
degree of their resemblance, without reference to the logico-temporal
divergence of genealogy.
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
Classificatory thought gives itself an essential space, which it
proceeds to efface at each moment. Disease exists only in that space,
since that space constitutes it as nature; and yet it always appears
rather out of phase in relation to that space, because it is manifested
in a real patient, beneath the observing eye of a forearmed doctor
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
There is no
process of evolution in which duration introduces new events of itself
and at its own insistence; time is integrated as a nosological constant,
not as an organic variable. The time of the body does not affect, and
still less determines, the time of the disease.
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
Doctor and patient are caught up in an
ever-greater proximity, bound together, the doctor by an ever-more
attentive, more insistent, more penetrating gaze, the patient by all
the silent, irreplaceable qualities that, in him, betray—that is, reveal and conceal—the clearly ordered forms of the disease.
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
In the medicine of species, disease has, as a birthright, forms and
seasons that are alien to the space of societies. There is a ‘savage’
nature of disease that is both its true nature and its most obedient
course: alone, free of intervention, without medical artifice, it reveals
the ordered, almost vegetal nervure of its essence.
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.
Like civilization, the hospital is an artificial locus in which the
transplanted disease runs the risk of losing its essential identity.
Foucault, Michel and A. M. Sheridan (Translator). The Birth of the Clinic. 1963.