There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself. - Michel Foucault
I have not tried to write the history of that language, but rather the archaeology of that silence. - Michel Foucault
Le fou ce ne sera plus l’exilé, celui qu’on repousse dans les marges de nos villes, mais celui qu’on rend étranger à lui même en le culpabilisant d’être celui qu’il est. - Michel Foucault
It may well be that we talk about sex more than anything else; we set our minds to the task; we convince ourselves that were have never said enough on the subject...where sex is concerned the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own. - Michel Foucault
The game is worthwhile in so far as we don't know what will be the end. - Michel Foucault
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting. - Michel Foucault
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. - Michel Foucault
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. - Michel Foucault
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. - Michel Foucault
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place. - Michel Foucault
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. - 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. - Michel Foucault