Michel Foucault — "Madness is the absence of an oeuvre."
Madness is the absence of an oeuvre.
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More from Michel Foucault
"The exercise of power is not a simple game of prohibition."
"The history of thought is the history of systems of thought."
"One day, perhaps, one will be able to detach the power of the gaze from the power of the state."
"The West has been obsessed with sex for centuries, not because it is repressed, but because it is an object of knowledge and power."
"I dream of a society where the power relations are transparent."
About Michel Foucault (1926-1984)
French philosopher and historian whose Discipline and Punish (1975) and The History of Sexuality reframed power, knowledge, and institutions in modern thought. Closely associated with Jacques Derrida (deconstruction peer) and Gilles Deleuze (philosophical ally on power and difference). For an intellectual contrast, see Jürgen Habermas, German social theorist of communicative rationality — Habermas insisted on universal norms of reason — exactly the position Foucault's 'power/knowledge' framework treats as itself a power effect. The Foucault-Habermas debate is the canonical postwar argument over whether reason is universal-emancipatory or always-already complicit with power.
The standard scholarly entry points to Michel Foucault's work: Didier Eribon (French intellectual biographer) — Michel Foucault (1989); Stuart Elden (Warwick, political geographer) — Foucault's Last Decade (2016); Gary Gutting (Notre Dame, philosophy) — Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (2005). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Michel Foucault.