Michel Foucault
Power structures, postmodernism
Sayings by Michel Foucault
The political is not a matter of choice; it is a matter of necessity.
My work is not to tell people what to do.
The history of ideas is a history of discontinuity.
The most important thing for me is to try to understand what is happening in the world today.
The prison is the only place where the law can be applied in its pure form, without any distortion.
Sexuality is not a repressed instinct, but a historical construct.
Madness is not a natural phenomenon, but a cultural invention.
The human sciences are a form of power, not a form of knowledge.
The individual is a product of power, not a source of it.
My role—and that is all I claim—is to show that things are not as self-evident as one might believe.
The discourse of truth is always linked to the exercise of power.
The history of sexuality is the history of the body.
The doctor is a figure of power, not a figure of knowledge.
The West has been obsessed with sex for centuries, not because it is repressed, but because it is an object of knowledge and power.
The individual is not a subject, but an effect of power.
The panopticon is a perfect architectural figure of power.
We must not imagine that power is a property, but rather that it is a strategy.
The human being is an invention of recent date. And one that will soon come to an end.
The analysis of power relations is not about condemning power, but about understanding its mechanisms.
The function of punishment is not to deter crime, but to maintain social order.