Background Image

...

Why Shouldn't I Be Interested In Politics? That Is To Say, What Blindness, What Deafness, What Density Of Ideology Would Have To Weigh Me Down To Prevent Me From Being Interested In What Is Probably The Most Crucial Subject To Our Existence, That Is To Say The Society In Which We Live, The Economic Relations Within Which It Functions, And The System Of Power Which Defines The Regular Forms And The Regular Permissions And Prohibitions Of Our Conduct. The Essence Of Our Life Consists, After All, Of The Political Functioning Of The Society In Which We Find Ourselves.

-Michel Foucault

...

Please Wait....
Translating....

Why Shouldn't I Be

Michel Foucault

...

Why Shouldn't I Be Interested In Politics? That Is To Say, What Blindness, What Deafness, What Density Of Ideology Would Have To Weigh Me Down To Prevent Me From Being Interested In What Is Probably The Most Crucial Subject To Our Existence, That Is To Say The Society In Which We Live, The Economic Relations Within Which It Functions, And The System Of Power Which Defines The Regular Forms And The Regular Permissions And Prohibitions Of Our Conduct. The Essence Of Our Life Consists, After All, Of The Political Functioning Of The Society In Which We Find Ourselves.

Views: 5

Topic

More From Michel Foucault

As The Archaeology Of Our Thought Easily Shows, Man Is An Invention Of Recent Date. And One Perhaps Nearing Its End.

Penal Law Was Not Created By The Common People, Nor By The Peasantry, Nor By The Proletariat, But Entirely By The Bourgeoisie As An Important Tactical Weapon In This System Of Divisions Which They Wished To Introduce.

Are The Prisons Overpopulated, Or Is The Population Over-imprisoned ?

In Its Function, The Power To Punish Is Not Essentially Different From That Of Curing Or Educating.

Our Society Is Not One Of Spectacle But Of Surveillance.

It Is The Certainty Of Being Punished And Not The Horrifying Spectacle Of Public Punishment That Must Discourage Crime

Power Is Everywhere...because It Comes From Everywhere.

Methodologically Speaking, The Rejection By [john] Boswell Of The Categorical Opposition Between Homosexual And Heterosexual, Which Plays Such A Significant Role In The Way Our Culture Conceives Of Homosexuality, Represents An Advance Not Only In Scholarship But In Cultural Criticism As Well.

What Strikes Me Is The Fact That In Our Society, Art Has Become Something Which Is Related Only To Objects And Not To Individuals, Or To Life. That Art Is Something Which Is Specialized Or Which Is Done By Experts Who Are Artists. But Couldn't Everyone's Life Become A Work Of Art? Why Should The Lamp Or The House Be An Art Object, But Not Our Life?

Withdraw Allegiance From The Old Categories Of The Negative (law, Limit, Castration, Lack, Lacuna), Which The Western Thought Has So Long Held Sacred As A Form Of Power And An Access To Reality. 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.

What I Seek Is A Permanent Opening Of Possibilities.

Waiting Is Directed At Nothing: Any Object That Could Gratify It Would Only Efface It. Still, It Is Not Confined To One Place, It Is Not A Resigned Immobility; It Has The Endurance Of A Movement That Will Never End And Would Never Promise Itself The Reward Of Rest; It Does Not Wrap Itself In Interiority; All Of It Falls Irremediably Outside.

Take The Notion Of Tradition: It Is Intended To Give A Special Temporal Status To A Group Of Phenomena That Are Both Successive And Identical (or At Least Similar); It Makes It Possible To Rethink The Dispersion Of History In The Form Of The Same; It Allows A Reduction Of The Difference Proper To Every Beginning, In Order To Pursue Without Discontinuity The Endless Search For Origin.

Thought Is No Longer Theoretical. As Soon As It Functions It Offends Or Reconciles, Attracts Or Repels, Breaks, Dissociates, Unites Or Reunites; It Cannot Help But Liberate Or Enslave. Even Before Prescribing, Suggesting A Future, Saying What Must Be Done, Even Before Exhorting Or Merely Sounding An Alarm, Thought, At The Level Of Its Existence, In Its Very Dawning, Is In Itself An Action-a Perilous Act.

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.

Thought Is Not What Inhabits A Certain Conduct And Gives It Its Meaning; Rather, It Is What Allows One To Step Back From This Way Of Acting Or Reacting, To Present It To Oneself As An Object Of Thought And To Question It As To Its Meaning, Its Conditions, And Its Goals. Thought Is Freedom In Relation To What One Does, The Motion By Which One Detaches From It, Establishes It As An Object, And Reflects On It As A Problem.

The Way People Really Think Is Not Adequately Analyzed By The Universal Categories Of Logic. Between Social History And Formal Analyses Of Thought There Is A Path, A Lane - Maybe Very Narrow - Which Is The Path Of The Historian Of Thought.

Life Itself Was Only Futility, Vain Words, A Squabble Of Cap And Bells.

Futility Of Life

I Wasn't Always Smart, I Was Actually Very Stupid In School [t]here Was A Boy Who Was Very Attractive Who Was Even Stupider Than I Was. And In Order To Ingratiate Myself With This Boy Who Was Very Beautiful, I Began To Do His Homework For Him – And That's How I Became Smart, I Had To Do All This Work To Just Keep Ahead Of Him A Little Bit, In Order To Help Him. In A Sense, All The Rest Of My Life I've Been Trying To Do Intellectual Things That Would Attract Beautiful Boys.

...it's My Hypothesis That The Individual Is Not A Pre-given Entity Which Is Seized On By The Exercise Of Power. The Individual, With His Identity And Characteristics, Is The Product Of A Relation Of Power Exercised Over Bodies, Multiplicities, Movements, Desires, Forces.

Death Left Its Old Tragic Heaven And Became The Lyrical Core Of Man: His Invisible Truth, His Visible Secret.

Probably It's Insufficient To Say That Behind The Governments, Behind The Apparatus Of The State, There Is The Dominant Class; One Must Locate The Point Of Activity, The Places And Forms In Which Its Domination Is Exercised. And Because This Domination Is Not Simply The Expression In Political Terms Of Economic Exploitation, It Is Its Instrument And, To A Large Extent, The Condition Which Makes It Possible; The Suppression Of The One Is Achieved Through The Exhaustive Discernment Of The Other.

What Desire Can Be Contrary To Nature Since It Was Given To Man By Nature Itself?

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

... We Are Obliged To Produce The Truth By The Power That Demands Truth And Needs It In Order To Function: We Are Constrained, We Are Condemned To Admit The Truth Or To Discover It. Power Constantly Asks Questions And Questions Us; It Constantly Investigates And Records; It Institutionalizes The Search For The Truth, Professionalizes It, And Rewards It. ... In A Different Sense, We Are Also Subject To The Truth In The Sense That Truth Lays Down The Law: It Is The Discourse Of Truth That Decides, At Least In Part; It Conveys And Propels Effects Of Power.

Knowledge And Power

If I Open A Book And See That The Author Is Accusing An Adversary Of "infantile Leftism" I Shut It Again Right Away. That's Not My Way Of Doing Things; I Don't Belong To The World Of People Who Do Things That Way. I Insist On This Difference As Something Essential: A Whole Morality Is At Stake; The One That Concerns The Search For Truth And The Relation To The Other.

The Real Political Task In A Society Such As Ours Is To Criticize The Workings Of Institutions That Appear To Be Both Neutral And Independent, To Criticize And Attack Them In Such A Manner That The Political Violence That Has Always Exercised Itself Obscurely Through Them Will Be Unmasked, So That One Can Fight Against Them.

Why Should The Lamp Or The House Be An Art Object But Not Our Life?

In Civilizations Without Boats, Dreams Dry Up, Espionage Takes The Place Of Adventure And The Police Take The Place Of Pirates.

Chance Does Not Speak Essentially Through Words Nor Can It Be Seen In Their Convolution. It Is The Eruption Of Language, Its Sudden Appearance. It's Not A Night Twinkle With Stars, An Illuminated Sleep, Nor A Drowsy Vigil. It Is The Very Edge Of Consciousness.

It's Not A Matter Of Emancipating Truth From Every System Of Power (which Would Be A Chimera, For Truth Is Already Power) But Of Detaching The Power Of Truth From The Forms Of Hegemony, Social, Economic And Cultural, Within Which It Operates At The Present Time

If You Knew When You Began A Book What You Would Say At The End, Do You Think That You Would Have The Courage To Write It? What Is True For Writing And For A Love Relationship Is True Also For Life. The Game Is Worthwhile Insofar As We Don't Know What Will Be The End.

I Belong To That Generation Who, As Students, Had Before Their Eyes, And Were Limited By, A Horizon Consisting Of Marxism, Phenomenology And Existentialism. For Me The Break Was First Beckett's Waiting For Godot, A Breathtaking Performance.

[john Boswell] Introduction Of The Concept Of "gay" (in The Way He Defines It) Provides Us Both With A Useful Instrument Of Research And At The Same Time A Better Comprehension Of How People Actually Conceive Of Themselves And Their Sexual Behavior.

I Think I Have In Fact Been Situated In Most Of The Squares On The Political Checkerboard, One After Another And Sometimes Simultaneously: As Anarchist, Leftist, Ostentatious Or Disguised Marxist, Nihilist, Explicit Or Secret Anti-marxist, Technocrat In The Service Of Gaullism, New Liberal And So On.

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 Work Of An Intellectual Is Not To Mould The Political Will Of Others; It Is, Through The Analyses That He Does In His Own Field, To Re-examine Evidence And Assumptions, To Shake Up Habitual Ways Of Working And Thinking, To Dissipate Conventional Familiarities, To Re-evaluate Rules And Institutions And To Participate In The Formation Of A Political Will (where He Has His Role As Citizen To Play).

Madness Designates The Equinox Between The Vanity Of Night's Hallucinations And The Non-being Of Light's Judgments.

Total Surveillance Is Increasingly The General Condition Of Society As A Whole.

The 'enlightenment', Which Discovered The Liberties, Also Invented The Disciplines.

In Actual Fact. The Manifold Sexualities - Those Which Appear With The Different Ages (sexualities Of The Infant Or The Child), Those Which Become Fixated On Particular Tastes Or Practices (the Sexuality Of The Invert, The Gerontophile, The Fetishist), Those Which, In A Diffuse Manner, Invest Relationships (the Sexuality Of Doctor And Patient, Teacher And Student, Psychiatrist And Mental Patient), Those Which Haunt Spaces (the Sexuality Of The Home, The School, The Prison)- All Form The Correlate Of Exact Procedures Of Power.

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.

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.

If Repression Has Indeed Been The Fundamental Link Between Power, Knowledge, And Sexuality Since The Classical Age, It Stands To Reason That We Will Not Be Able To Free Ourselves From It Except At A Considerable Cost.

And Now, If We Try To Assign A Value, In And Of Itself, Outside Its Relations To The Dream And With Error, To Classical Unreason, We Must Understand It Not As Reason Diseased, Or As Reason Lost Or Alienated, But Quite Simply As Reason Dazzled.

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.

Truth Is Not By Nature Free - Nor Error Servile - But That Its Production Is Thoroughly Imbued With Relations Of Power.

But Let There Be No Misunderstanding: It Is Not That A Real Man, The Object Of Knowledge, Philosophical Reflection Or Technological Intervention, Has Been Substituted For The Soul, The Illusion Of Theologians. The Man Described For Us, Whom We Are Invited To Free, Is Already In Himself The Effect Of A Subjection More Profound Than Himself. A 'soul' Inhabits Him And Brings Him To Existence, Which Is Itself A Factor In The Mastery That Power Exercises Over The Body. The Soul Is The Effect And Instrument Of A Political Anatomy; The Soul Is The Prison Of The Body.

It Seems To Me That The Real Political Task In A Society Such As Ours Is To Criticise The Workings Of Institutions, Which Appear To Be Both Neutral And Independent; To Criticise And Attack Them In Such A Manner That The Political Violence Which Has Always Exercised Itself Obscurely Through Them Will Be Unmasked, So That One Can Fight Against Them.

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.

Knowledge Is Not Made For Understanding; It Is Made For Cutting.

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.

[knowledge Is Governed Not By] A Theory Of Knowledge, But By A Theory Of Discursive Practice.

Theory Of Knowledge

I Am Hopelessly In Love With A Memory. An Echo From Another Time, Another Place.

Hopelessly In Love

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?

A Real Subjection Is Born Mechanically From A Fictitious Relation [...] He Who Is Subjected To A Field Of Visibility, And Who Knows It, Assumes Responsibility For The Constraints Of Power; He Makes Them Play Spontaneously Upon Himself; He Inscribed In Himself The Power Relation In Which He Simultaneously Plays Both Roles; He Becomes The Principle Of His Own Subjection.

In The Renaissance, Madness Was Present Everywhere And Mingled With Every Experience By Its Images Or Its Dangers. During The Classical Period, Madness Was Shown, But On The Other Side Of Bars; If Present, It Was At A Distance, Under The Eyes Of A Reason That No Longer Felt Any Relation To It And That Would Not Compromise Itself By Too Close A Resemblance. Madness Had Become A Thing To Look At: No Longer A Monster Inside Oneself, But An Animal With Strange Mechanisms, A Bestiality From Which Man Had Long Since Been Suppressed.

Once Leprosy Had Gone, And The Figure Of The Leper Was No More Than A Distant Memory, These Structures Still Remained. The Game Of Exclusion Would Be Played Again, Often In These Same Places, In An Oddly Similar Fashion Two Or Three Centuries Later. The Role Of The Leper Was To Be Played By The Poor And By The Vagrant, By Prisoners And By The 'alienated', And The Sort Of Salvation At Stake For Both Parties In This Game Of Exclusion Is The Matter Of This Study.

Knowledge Is Not For Knowing: Knowledge Is For Cutting.

Resistances Do Not Derive From A Few Heterogeneous Principles; But Neither Are They A Lure Or A Promise That Is Of Necessity Betrayed. They Are The Odd Term In Relations Of Power; They Are Inscribed In The Latter As An Irreducible Opposite.

The Court Is The Bureaucracy Of The Law. If You Bureaucratise Popular Justice Then You Give It The Form Of A Court.

'truth' Is To Be Understood As A System Of Ordered Procedures For The Production, Regulation, Distribution, Circulation And Operation Of Statements. 'truth' Is Linked In A Circular Relation With Systems Of Power Which Produce And Sustain It, And To Effects Of Power Which It Induces And Which Extend It. A 'regime' Of Truth.

Knowledge And Power

The Appearance In Nineteenth-century Psychiatry, Jurisprudence, And Literature Of A Whole Series Of Discourses On The Species And Subspecies Of Homosexuality, Inversion, Pederasty, And "psychic Hermaphroditism" Made Possible A Strong Advance Of Social Controls Into This Area Of "perversity"; But It Also Made Possible The Formation Of A "reverse" Discourse: Homosexuality Began To Speak In Its Own Behalf, To Demand That Its Legitimacy Or "naturality" Be Acknowledged, Often In The Same Vocabulary, Using The Same Categories By Which It Was Medically Disqualified.

I Believe That Political Power Exercises Itself Through The Mediation Of A Certain Number Of Institutions Which Look As If They Have Nothing In Common With The Political Power, And As If They Are Independent Of It, While They Are Not.

Perhaps [transgression] Is Like A Flash Of Lightning In The Night Which, From The Beginning Of Time, Gives A Dense And Black Intensity To The Night It Denies, Which Lights Up The Night From The Inside, From Top To Bottom, Yet Owes To The Dark The Stark Clarity Of Its Manifestation, Its Harrowing And Poised Singularity.

People Will Be Surprised At The Eagerness With Which We Went Aboutpretending To Rouse From Its Slumber A Sexuality Which Everything-our Discourses, Our Customs, Our Institutions, Our Regulations, Our Knowledges-was Busy Producing In The Light Of Day And Broadcasting To Noisy Accompaniment.

Believe What Is Productive Is Not Sedentary But Nomadic.

I'm Not Making A Problem Out Of A Personal Question; I Make Of A Personal Question An Absence Of A Problem.

Personal Question

I'm Very Proud That Some People Think That I'm A Danger For The Intellectual Health Of Students. When People Start Thinking Of Health In Intellectual Activities, I Think There Is Something Wrong. In Their Opinion I Am A Dangerous Man, Since I Am A Crypto-marxist, An Irrationalist, A Nihilist.

My Point Is Not That Everything Is Bad, But That Everything Is Dangerous, Which Is Not Exactly The Same As Bad. If Everything Is Dangerous, Then We Always Have Something To Do. So My Position Leads Not To Apathy But To Hyper - And Pessimistic - Activism.

There Is A Sort Of Myth Of History That Philosophers Have.... History For Philosophers Is Some Sort Of Great, Vast Continuity In Which The Freedom Of Individuals And Economic Or Social Determinations Come And Get Entangled. When Someone Lays A Finger On One Of Those Great Themes--continuity, The Effective Exercise Of Human Liberty, How Individual Liberty Is Articulated With Social Determinations--when Someone Touches One Of These Three Myths, These Good People Start Crying Out That History Is Being Raped Or Murdered.

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.

A Way Of Life Can Be Shared Among Individuals Of Different Ages, Status, And Social Activity. It Can Yield Intense Relations Not Resembling Those That Are Institutionalized. It Seems To Me That A Way Of Life Can Yield A Culture And An Ethics. To Be "gay," I Think, Is Not To Identify With The Psychological Traits And The Visible Masks Of The Homosexual But To Try And Define And Develop A Way Of Life.

Justice Must Always Question Itself, Just As Society Can Exist Only By Means Of The Work It Does On Itself And On Its Institutions.

Why Shouldn't I Be Interested In Politics? That Is To Say, What Blindness, What Deafness, What Density Of Ideology Would Have To Weigh Me Down To Prevent Me From Being Interested In What Is Probably The Most Crucial Subject To Our Existence, That Is To Say The Society In Which We Live, The Economic Relations Within Which It Functions, And The System Of Power Which Defines The Regular Forms And The Regular Permissions And Prohibitions Of Our Conduct. The Essence Of Our Life Consists, After All, Of The Political Functioning Of The Society In Which We Find Ourselves.

An American Professor Complained That A Crypto-marxist Like Me Was Invited In The Usa, And I Was Denounced By The Press In Eastern European Countries For Being An Accomplice Of The Dissidents. None Of These Descriptions Is Important By Itself; Taken Together, On The Other Hand, They Mean Something. And I Must Admit That I Rather Like What They Mean.

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.

What Is Constitutive Is The Action That Divides Madness, And Not The Science Elaborated Once This Division Is Made.

The Constitution Of Madness As A Mental Illness, At The End Of The Eighteenth Century, Affords The Evidence Of A Broken Dialogue, Posits The Separation As Already Effected, And Thrusts Into Oblivion All Those Stammered, Imperfect Words Without Fixed Syntax In Which The Exchange Between Madness And Reason Was Made. The Language Of Psychiatry, Which Is A Monologue Of Reason About Madness, Has Been Established Only On The Basis Of Such A Silence.

The Soul Is The Prison Of The Body.

[raymond Roussel] Said That After His First Book He Expected That The Next Morning There Would Be A Kind Of Aura Around His Person And That Everyone In The Street Would Be Able To See That He Had Written A Book. This Is The Obscure Desire Harboured By Everyone Who Writes. It Is True That The First Text One Writes Is Neither Written For Others, Nor Because One Is What One Is: One Writes To Become Other Than What One Is. One Tries To Modify One's Way Of Being Through The Act Of Writing.

To Work Is To Undertake To Think Something Other Than What One Has Thought Before

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.

Relations Of Power "are Indissociable From A Discourse Of Truth, And They Can Neither Be Established Nor Function Unless A True Discourse Is Produced, Accumulated, Put Into Circulation, And Set To Work. Power Cannot Be Exercised Unless A Certain Economy Of Discourses Of Truth Functions In, On The Basis Of, And Thanks To, That Power."

Knowledge And Power

It Is Meaningless To Speak In The Name Of - Or Against - Reason, Truth, Or Knowledge.

One Cannot Attend To Oneself, Take Care Of Oneself, Without A Relationship To Another Person.

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.

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.

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.

Matthey, A Geneva Physician Very Close To Rousseau's Influence, Formulates The Prospect For All Men Of Reason: 'do Not Glory In Your State, If You Are Wise And Civilized Men; An Instant Suffices To Disturb And Annihilate That Supposed Wisdom Of Which You Are So Proud; An Unexpected Event, A Sharp And Sudden Emotion Of The Soul Will Abruptly Change The Most Reasonable And Intelligent Man Into A Raving Idiot.

We Must Escape And Help Others To Escape The Two Readymade Formulas Of The Pure Sexual Encounter And The Lovers' Fusion Of Identities.

Let Us Ask... How Things Work At The Level Of On-going Subjugation, At The Level Of Those Continuous And Uninterrupted Processes Which Subject Our Bodies, Govern Our Gestures, Dictate Our Behaviors, Etc... We Should Try To Discover How It Is That Subjects Are Gradually, Progressively, Really And Materially Constituted Through A Multiplicity Of Organisms, Forces, Energies, Materials, Desires, Thoughts, Etc. We Should Try To Grasp Subjection In Its Material Instance As A Constitution Of Subjects.

Do Not Think That One Has To Be Sad In Order To Be Militant, Even Though The Thing One Is Fighting Is Abominable.

Visibility Is A Trap.

It Is One Of My Targets To Show People That A Lot Of Things That Are Part Of Their Landscape - That People Are Universal - Are The Result Of Some Very Precise Historical Changes. All My Analyses Are Against The Idea Of Universal Necessities In Human Existence. They Show The Arbitrariness Of Institutions And Show Which Space Of Freedom We Can Still Enjoy And How Many Changes Can Still Be Made.

One Makes War To Win, Not Because It's Just.

Where There Is Power, There Is Resistance.

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.

Interest In Life

Do Not Ask Who I Am And Do Not Ask Me To Remain The Same.

My Role - And That Is Too Emphatic A Word - Is To Show People That They Are Much Freer Than They Feel, That People Accept As Truth, As Evidence, Some Themes Which Have Been Built Up At A Certain Moment During History, And That This So-called Evidence Can Be Criticized And Destroyed.

You Know The Difference Between A Real Science And A Pseudoscience? A Real Science Recognizes And Accepts Its Own History Without Feeling Attacked. When You Tell A Psychiatrist His Mental Institution Came From A Lazar House, He Becomes Infuriated.

The Language Of Psychiatry, Which Is A Monologue By Reason About Madness, Could Only Have Come Into Existence In Such A Silence.

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.

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.

And More Than Once In The Course Of Time, The Same Theme Reappears: Among The Mystics Of The Fifteenth Century, It Has Become The Motif Of The Soul As A Skiff, Abandoned On The Infinite Sea Of Desires, In The Sterile Field Of Cares And Ignorance, Among The Mirages Of Knowledge, Amid The Unreason Of The World - A Craft At The Mercy Of The Sea's Great Madness, Unless It Throws Out A Solid Anchor, Faith, Or Raises Its Spiritual Sails So That The Breath Of God May Bring It To Port.

To Change Something In The Minds Of People - That's The Role Of An Intellectual.

Unreason Is In The Same Relation To Reason As Dazzlement To The Brightness Of Daylight Itself.

Maybe The Target Nowadays Is Not To Discover What We Are But To Refuse What We Are.

...if You Are Not Like Everybody Else, Then You Are Abnormal, If You Are Abnormal , Then You Are Sick. These Three Categories, Not Being Like Everybody Else, Not Being Normal And Being Sick Are In Fact Very Different But Have Been Reduced To The Same Thing

Madness, In Its Wild, Untamable Words, Proclaims Its Own Meaning; In Its Chimeras, It Utters Its Secret Truth.

Schools Serve The Same Social Functions As Prisons And Mental Institutions- To Define, Classify, Control, And Regulate People.

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.

Sexuality Is A Part Of Our Behavior. It's Part Of Our World Freedom. Sexuality Is Something That We Ourselves Create. It Is Our Own Creation, And Much More Than The Discovery Of A Secret Side Of Our Desire. We Have To Understand That With Our Desires Go New Forms Of Relationships, New Forms Of Love, New Forms Of Creation. Sex Is Not A Fatality; It's A Possibility For Creative Life. It's Not Enough To Affirm That We Are Gay But We Must Also Create A Gay Life.

The Political And Social Processes By Which The Western European Societies Were Put In Order Are Not Very Apparent, Have Been Forgotten, Or Have Become Habitual. They Are Part Of Our Most Familiar Landscape, And We Don't Perceive Them Anymore. But Most Of Them Once Scandalized People.

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.

If I Won A Few Billion In The Lottery, I Would Create An Institute Where People Who Would Like To Die Would Come Spend A Weekend, A Week, Or A Month In Pleasure, Under Drugs Perhaps, In Order To Disappear Afterward, As If Erased.

At Every Moment, Step By Step, One Must Confront What One Is Thinking And Saying With What One Is Doing, What One Is.

Psychoanalysis Can Unravel Some Of The Forms Of Madness; It Remains A Stranger To The Sovereign Enterprise Of Unreason. It Can Neither Limit Nor Transcribe, Nor Most Certainly Explain, What Is Essential In This Enterprise.

It Might Be Said That All Knowledge Is Linked To The Essential Forms Of Cruelty.

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.

One Should Try To Locate Power At The Extreme Of Its Exercise, Where It Is Always Less Legal In Character.

The University And In A General Way, All Teaching Systems, Which Appear Simply To Disseminate Knowledge, Are Made To Maintain A Certain Social Class In Power; And To Exclude The Instruments Of Power Of Another Social Class.

There Is Not One But Many Silences, And They Are An Integral Part Of The Strategies That Underlie And Permeate Discourses.

We Should Not Be Content To Say That Power Has A Need For Such-and-such A Discovery, Such-and-such A Form Of Knowledge, But We Should Add That The Exercise Of Power Itself Creates And Causes To Emerge New Objects Of Knowledge And Accumulates New Bodies Of Information. ... The Exercise Of Power Perpetually Creates Knowledge And, Conversely, Knowledge Constantly Induces Effects Of Power. ... It Is Not Possible For Power To Be Exercised Without Knowledge, It Is Impossible For Knowledge Not To Engender Power.

Knowledge And Power

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.

Literature Is A Form Of Language That Breaks With The Whole Definition Of Genres As Forms Adapted To An Order Of Representations, And Becomes Merely A Manifestation Of A Language Which Has No Other Law Than That Of Affirming In Opposition To All Other Forms Of Discourse Its Own Precipitous Existence.

[l]et Us Say That We Are Obliged To Produce The Truth By The Power That Demands Truth And Needs It In Order To Function: We Are Forced To Tell The Truth, We Are Constrained, We Are Condemned To Admit The Truth Or To Discover 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.

My Point Is Not That Everything Is Bad, But That Everything Is Dangerous, Which Is Not Exactly The Same As Bad.

We Are Freer Than We Think.

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.

If Those Arrangements [the Fundamental Arrangements Of Knowledge] Were To Disappear As They Appeared... Then One Can Certainly Wager That Man Would Be Erased, Like A Face Drawn In Sand At The Edge Of The Sea.

There Is Object Proof That Homosexuality Is More Interesting Than Heterosexuality. It's That One Knows A Considerable Number Of Heterosexuals Who Would Wish To Become Homosexuals, Whereas One Knows Very Few Homosexuals Who Would Really Like To Become Heterosexuals.

Heterosexuality Is

[t]ruly To Escape Hegel Involves An Exact Appreciation Of The Price We Have To Pay To Detach Ourselves From Him. It Assumes That We Are Aware Of The Extent To Which Hegel, Insidiously Perhaps, Is Close To Us; It Implies A Knowledge, In That Which Permits Us To Think Against Hegel, Of That Which Remains Hegelian. We Have To Determine The Extent To Which Our Anti-hegelianism Is Possibly One Of His Tricks Directed Against Us, At The End Of Which He Stands, Motionless, Waiting For Us.

Confined On The Ship, From Which There Is No Escape, The Madman Is Delivered To The River With Its Thousand Arms, The Sea With Its Thousand Roads, To That Great Uncertainty External To Everything. He Is A Prisoner In The Midst Of What Is The Freest, The Openest Of Routes: Bound Fast At The Infinite Crossroads. He Is The Passenger Par Excellence: That Is, The Prisoner Of The Passage. And The Land He Will Come To Is Unknown—as Is, Once He Disembarks, The Land From Which He Comes. He Has His Truth And His Homeland Only In That Fruitless Expanse Between Two Countries That Cannot Belong To Him.

During The Years 1945-1965 (i Am Referring To Europe), There Was A Certain Way Of Thinking Correctly, A Certain Style Of Politicaldiscourse, A Certain Ethics Of The Intellectual. One Had To Be On Familiar Terms With Marx, Not Let One's Dreams Stray Too Far From Freud.... These Were Therequirements That Made The Strange Occupation Of Writing And Speaking A Measure Of Truth About Oneself And One's Time Acceptable.

I'm No Prophet. My Job Is Making Windows Where There Were Once Walls.

Do Not Use Thought To Ground A Political Practice In Truth; Nor Political Action To Discredit, As Mere Speculation, A Line Of Thought. Use Political Practice As An Intensifier Of Thought, And Analysis As A Multiplier Of The Forms And Domains For The Intervention Of Political Action.

Wars Are No Longer Waged In The Name Of A Sovereign Who Must Be Defended; They Are Waged On Behalf Of The Existence Of Everyone; Entire Populations Are Mobilized For The Purpose Of Wholesale Slaughter In The Name Of Life Necessity: Massacres Have Become Vital.

For Millenia, Man Remained What He Was For Aristotle: A Living Animal With The Additional Capacity For A Political Existence; Modern Man Is An Animal Whose Politics Places His Exitence As A Living Being In Question.

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.

The Most Defenseless Tenderness And The Bloodiest Of Powers Have A Similar Need Of Confession. Western Man Has Become A Confessing Animal.

[t]hus One Should Not Think That Desire Is Repressed, For The Simple Reason That The Law Is What Constitutes Both Desire And The Lack On Which It Is Predicated. Where There Is Desire, The Power Relation Is Already Present: An Illusion, Then, To Denounce This Relation For A Repression Exerted After The Event.

The Soul Is The Effect And Instrument Of A Political Anatomy; The Soul Is The Prison Of The Body

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

Confession Frees, But Power Reduces One To Silence; Truth Does Not Belong To The Order Of Power, But Shares An Origincal Affinity With Freedom: Traditional Themes In Philosophy, Which A Political History Of Truth Would Have To Overturn By Showing That Truth Is Not By Nature Free--nor Error Servile--but That Its Production Is Thoroughly Imbued With Relations Of Power. The Confession Is An Example Of This.

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.

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.

People Can Tolerate Two Homosexuals They See Leaving Together, But The Next Day They're Smiling, Holding Hands, Tenderly Embracing One Another, Then They Cannot Be Forgiven. It Is Not The Departure For Pleasure That Is Unacceptable, It Is Waking Up Happy.

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.

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.

Nature, Keeping Only Useless Secrets, Had Placed Within Reach And In Sight Of Human Beings The Things It Was Necessary For Them To Know.

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.

In The Middle Ages And The Renaissance, Man's Dispute With Madness Was Dramatic Debate In Which He Confronted The Secret Powers Of The World; The Experience Of Madness Was Clouded By Images Of The Fall And The Will Of God, Of The Beast And The Metamorphosis, And Of All The Marvelous Secrets Of Knowledge

Because They Claim To Be Concerned With The Welfare Of Whole Societies, Governments Arrogate To Themselves The Right To Pass Off As Mere Abstract Profit Or Loss The Human Unhappiness That Their Decisions Provoke Or Their Negligence Permits. It Is A Duty Of An International Citizenship To Always Bring The Testimony Of People's Suffering To The Eyes And Ears Of Governments, Sufferings For Which It's Untrue That They Are Not Responsible. The Suffering Of Men Must Never Be A Mere Silent Residue Of Policy. It Grounds An Absolute Right To Stand Up And Speak To Those Who Hold Power.

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.

Politics And The Economy Are Not Things That Exist, Or Illusions, Or Ideologies. They Are Things That Do Not Exist And Yet Which Are Inscribed In Reality And Fall Under A Regime Of Truth Dividing The True And The False.

One Can Say That The Author Is An Ideological Product, Since We Represent Him As The Opposite Of His Historically Real Function. (when A Historically Given Function Is Represented In A Figure That Inverts It, One Has An Ideological Production.) The Author Is Therefore The Ideological Figure By Which One Marks The Manner In Which We Fear The Proliferation Of Meaning.

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.

'the Prison' Begins Well Before Its Doors. It Begins As Soon As You Leave Your House - And Even Before.

Sexual Behavior Is Not, As Is Too Often Assumed, A Superimposition Of, On The One Hand, Desires Which Derive From Natural Instincts, And, On The Other Hand, Of Permissive Or Restrictive Laws Which Tell Us What We Should Or Shouldn't Do. Sexual Behavior Is More Than That.

There Are More Ideas On Earth Than Intellectuals Imagine. And These Ideas Are More Active, Stronger, More Resistant, More Passionate Than "politicians" Think. 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. Ideas Do Not Rule The World. But It Is Because The World Has Ideas (and Because It Constantly Produces Them) That It Is Not Passively Ruled By Those Who Are Its Leaders Or Those Who Would Like To Teach It, Once And For All, What It Must Think.

Is It Surprising That Prisons Resemble Factories, Schools, Barracks, Hospitals, Which All Resemble Prisons?

A Law Which Excludes All Dialectic And All Reconciliation; Which Establishes, Consequently, Both The Flawless Unity Of Knowledge And The Uncompromising Division Of Tragic Existence; It Rules Over A World Without Twilight, Which Knows No Effusion, Nor The Attenuated Cares Of Lyricism; Everything Must Be Either Waking Or Dream, Truth Or Darkness, The Light Of Being Or The Nothingness Of Shadow.

The Gaze That Sees Is The Gaze That Dominates.

To Seek In The Great Accumulation Of The Already-said The Text That Resembles "in Advance" A Later Text, To Ransack History In Order To Rediscover The Play Of Anticipations Or Echoes, To Go Right Back To The First Seeds Or To Go Forward To The Last Traces, To Reveal In A Work Its Fidelity To Tradition Or Its Irreducible Uniqueness, To Raise Or Lower Its Stock Of Originality, To Say That The Port -royal Grammarians Invented Nothing, Or To Discover That Cuvier Had More Predecessors Than One Thought, These Are Harmless Enough Amusements For Historians Who Refuse To Grow Up.

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.

Freedom Of Conscience Entails More Dangers Than Authority And Despotism.

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.

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 Uncover Our Rituals For What They Are: Completely Arbitrary Things, Tied To Our Bourgeois Way Of Life; It Isgood-and That Is The Real Theater-totranscend Them In The Manner Of Play, Bymeans Of Games And Irony; It Is Good To Be Dirty And Bearded, To Have Long Hair,to Look Like A Girl When One Is A Boy (and Vice Versa); One Must Put "inplay," Show Up, Transform And Reversethe Systems Which Quietly Order Us About.

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.

I Don't Feel That It Is Necessary To Know Exactly What I Am.

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. If You Knew When You Began A Book What You Would Say At The End, Do You Think That You Would Have The Courage To Write It? What Is True For Writing And For Love Relationships Is True Also For Life. The Game Is Worthwhile Insofar As We Don’t Know What Will Be The End.

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.

Man Is A Thinking Being. The Way He Thinks Is Related To Society, Politics, Economics, And History And Is Also Related To Very General And Universal Categories And Formal Structures. But Thought Is Something Other Than Societal Relations.

There Is No Glory In Punishing

One Thing In Any Case Is Certain: Man Is Neither The Oldest Nor The Most Constant Problem That Has Been Posed For Human Knowledge.

A Critique Does Not Consist In Saying That Things Aren't Good The Way They Are. It Consists In Seeing On Just What Type Of Assumptions, Of Familiar Notions, Of Established And Unexamined Ways Of Thinking The Accepted Practices Are Based... To Do Criticism Is To Make Harder Those Acts Which Are Now Too Easy.

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.

On The Level Of Investigative Results, John Boswell's Methodology Has Led To The Discovery That What Has Been Called The Repression Of Homosexuality Does Not Date Back To Christianity Properly Speaking, But Developed Within The Christian Era At A Much Later Date. In This Type Of Analysis It Is Important To Be Aware Of The Way In Which People Conceived Of Their Own Sexuality.

A Critique Is Not A Matter Of Saying That Things Are Not Right As They Are. It Is A Matter Of Pointing Out On What Kinds Of Assumptions, What Kinds Of Familiar, Unchallenged, Unconsidered Modes Of Thought The Practices That We Accept Rest.

What Makes Power Hold Good, What Makes It Accepted, Is Simply The Fact That It Doesn't Only Weigh On Us As A Force That Says No, But That It Traverses And Produces Things, It Induces Pleasure, Forms Knowledge, Produces Discourse. It Needs To Be Considered As A Productive Network Which Runs Through The Whole Social Body, Much More Than As A Negative Instance Whose Function Is Repression

There Are Moments In Life Where The Question Of Knowing Whether One Might Think Otherwise Than One Thinks And Perceive Otherwise Than One Sees Is Indispensable If One Is To Continue To Observe Or Reflect... What Is Philosophy Today... If It Does Not Consist In, Instead Of Legitimizing What We Already Know, Undertaking To Know How And How Far It Might Be Possible To Think Otherwise?

The Best Moment Of Love Is When The Lover Leaves In The Taxi.

Homosexuality Appeared As One Of The Forms Of Sexuality When It Was Transposed From The Practice Of Sodomy Into A Kind Of Interior Androgyny, A Hermaphroditism Of The Soul. The Sodomite Had Been A Temporary Aberration; The Homosexual Was Now A Species.

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.

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.

Trending Author

Jose Maria Aznar

Bill Richardson

Category