Michel Foucault — "What is prison? It is a machine for grinding out delinquents."
What is prison? It is a machine for grinding out delinquents.
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More from Michel Foucault
"Power is not a thing, but a relationship."
"The prison is the only place where the law can be applied in its pure form, without any distortion."
"The panopticon is a perfect architectural figure of power."
"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."
"The role of philosophy is to question everything."
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.
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