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.
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.
Where there is power, there is resistance.
Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.
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.
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
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.
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.
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
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.
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.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
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
I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.
What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?
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 think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.
We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them.
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.
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.
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
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...
There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
There is no glory in punishing
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.
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body
The individual is the product of power.
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.
The language of psychiatry is a monologue of reason about madness
Death as the destruction of all things no longer had meaning when life was revealed to be a fatuous sequence of empty words, the hollow jingle of a jester’s cap and bells.
Power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.
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 court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.
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.
We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.
It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime
Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.
No seventeenth-century pedagogue would have publicly advised his disciple, as did Erasmus in his Dialogues, on the choice of a good prostitute.
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with it's thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything.
Self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality, violence and ugliness as beauty and justice.
It is meaningless to speak in the name of - or against - Reason, Truth, or Knowledge.
There is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.
In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.
In civilizations without ships, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure and the police take the place of corsairs.
Life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells.
In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one 'episteme' that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in theory or silently invested in a practice.
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.
Government is the right disposition of things.
Madness is the false punishment of a false solution, but by its own virtue it brings to light the real problem, which can then be truly resolved.
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.
As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.
How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?
We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.
Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.
My point is not that everything is bad, but that everything is dangerous.
