78 quotes
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are.
The Subject and Power (1982)
The gesture that divides madness is the constitutive one, not the science that grows up in the calm that returns after the division has been made.
History of Madness (1961)
Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought as a fish exists in water; that is, it ceases to breathe anywhere else.
One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.
Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
But when the madman laughs, he already laughs with the laugh of death; the lunatic, anticipating the macabre, has disarmed it.
Madness and Civilization (1961)
The disappearance of public executions marks therefore the decline of the spectacle; but it also marks a slackening of the hold on the body.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
One thing is certain: the link between water and madness is deeply rooted in the dream of the Western man.
History of Madness (1961)
The public execution, then, has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Unreason is to reason as dazzlement is to daylight.
History of Madness (1961)
It is ugly to be punishable, but there is no glory in punishing. Hence the double system of protection that justice has set up between itself and the punishment it imposes.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual. It belongs, even in minor cases, to the ceremonies by which power is manifested.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.
History of Sexuality (1976)
Between the fine point of the brush and the steely gaze, the scene is about to yield up its volume.
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)
Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)
Nietzsche was the first to release the desire to know from the sovereignty of knowledge itself: to re-establish the distance and exteriority that Aristotle cancelled.
Lectures on the Will to Know (1970)
This dysfunction of power was related to a central excess: what might be called the monarchical 'super-power', which identified the right to punish with the personal power of the sovereign.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
What is important is that sex was not only a question of sensation and pleasure, of law and interdiction, but also of the true and the false.
History of Sexuality (1976)