Michel Foucault — "People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do; but wha…"
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.
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More from Michel Foucault
"The discourse of truth is not always the discourse of freedom."
"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 care of the self is not a moral attitude but a way of life."
"Justice must be thought of as a struggle against injustice."
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.