Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
At every moment, step by step, one must confront what one is thinking and saying with what one is doing, what one is.
it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of pirates.
The language of psychiatry, which is a monologue by reason about madness, could only have come into existence in such a silence.
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.
Justice must always question itself, just as society can exist only by means of the work it does on itself and on its institutions.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.
Little information is published on prisons, it is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life.
We must escape and help others to escape the two readymade formulas of the pure sexual encounter and the lovers' fusion of identities.
I don't write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me.
Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.
The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.
Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history
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.
Madness is the absolute break with the work of art; it forms the constitutive moment of abolition, which dissolves in time the truth of the work of art.
There is no binary division to be made between what one says and what one does not say; we must try to determine the different ways of not saying things.
The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge.
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.
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
The lyricism of marginality may find inspiration in the image of the outlaw, the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.
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.
Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man to work, but the effect of a curse.
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.
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
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.
Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
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
Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories.
The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure.... And that's why S/M is really a subculture. It's a process of invention. S/M isthe use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure.
What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.
It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring.
Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.
Political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centres and invisible, little-known points of support; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn't expect it.
The first task of the doctor is ... political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government." Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated.
Where can an interrogation lead us which does not follow reason in its horizontal course, but seeks to retrace in time that constant vertically which confronts European culture with what it is not?
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.
Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
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.
The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.
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.