78 quotes
The soul is the prison of the body.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
In short, penal reform was born at the point of junction between the struggle against the super-power of the sovereign and that against the infra-power of acquired and tolerated illegalities.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought.
How to define the moment that I write?
We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another.
In the darkest region of the political field the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
The criticism of the reformers was directed not so much at the weakness or cruelty of those in authority, as at a bad economy of power.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Madness is the déjà-vu of death.
Madness and Civilization (1961)
Thus the image is burdened with supplementary meanings, and forced to express them. And dreams, madness, the unreasonable can also slip into this excess of meaning.
Domination is not that solid and global kind of domination that one person exercises over others, or one group over another, but the manifold forms of domination that can be exercised within society.
The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
A sovereign shows himself to be a tyrant if he disregards his honest advisors, or punishes them for what they have said.
Fearless Speech (2001)
Power is everywhere ... because it comes from everywhere.
At the opposite pole to this nature of shadows, madness fascinates because it is knowledge. It is knowledge, first, because all these absurd figures are in reality elements of a difficult, hermetic, esoteric learning.
I believe that political power also exercises itself through the mediation of a certain number of institutions that seem to have nothing in common with political power, that have the appearance of being independent, but are not.
Death’s annihilation is no longer anything because it was already everything, because life itself was only futility, vain words, a squabble of cap and bells. The head that will become a skull is already empty. Madness is the déja-vu of death.
Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (1961)
In the old system, the body of the condemned man became the king's property, on which the sovereign left his mark and brought down the effects of his power. Now he will be rather the property of society, the object of a collective and useful appropriation.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Not only must people know, they must see with their own eyes. Because they must be made to be afraid; but also because they must be the witnesses, the guarantors, of the punishment, and because they must to a certain extent take part in it.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.
The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972)
The second characteristic of parrhesia... there is always an exact coincidence between belief and truth.
Fearless Speech (2001)