78 quotes
Parrhesia is... always a "game" between the one who speaks the truth and the interlocutor.
Fearless Speech (2001)
One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.
A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest.
The aim of this Socratic parrhesiastic activity... is to lead the interlocutor to the choice of that kind of life (bios) that will be in Dorian-harmonic accord with, logos, virtue, courage, and truth.
Fearless Speech (2001)
The last characteristic of parrhesia... telling the truth is regarded as a duty.
Fearless Speech (2001)
Parrhesia is ordinarily translated into English by "free speech"... the parrhesiastes is the one who uses parrhesia, i.e., the one who speaks the truth.
Fearless Speech (2001)
In order for parrhesia to have positive political effects, it must... be linked to a good education, to intellectual and moral formation, to paideia or mathesis.
Fearless Speech (2001)
In... Plato, Socrates appears in the role of the perrhesiastes.
Fearless Speech (2001)
This is the moment when it becomes clear that the images of madness are nothing but dream and error, and that if the unfortunate sufferer who is blinded by them invokes them, it is the better to disappear with them into the annihilation for which they are destined.
History of Madness (1961)
There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations
Discipline and Punish (1977)
We are aware of all the inconveniences of prison, and that it is dangerous when it is not useless. And yet one cannot 'see' how to replace it. It is the detestable solution, which one seems unable to do without.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
If our intention now is to reveal classical unreason on its own terms, outside of its ties with dreams and error, it must be understood not as a form of reason that is somehow diseased, lost or mad, but quite simply as reason dazzled.
History of Madness (1961)
There is object proof that homosexuality is more interesting than heterosexuality. It's that one knows a considerable number of heterosexuals who would wish to become homosexuals, whereas one knows very few homosexuals who would really like to become heterosexuals.
The parrhesia comes from "below,"... and is directed... "above." ...[A]n ancient Greek would not say ...a teacher or father who criticizes a child uses parrhesia.
Fearless Speech (2001)
This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge; a genealogy of the present scientifico-legal complex from which the power to punish derives its bases, justifications and rules, from which it extends its effects and by which it extends its effects and by which it masks its exorbitant singularity.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
A law which excludes all dialectic and all reconciliation; which establishes, consequently, both the flawless unity of knowledge and the uncompromising division of tragic existence; it rules over a world without twilight, which knows no effusion, nor the attenuated cares of lyricism; everything must be either waking or dream, truth or darkness, the light of being or the nothingness of shadow.
He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
Discipline and Punish (1977)
There has been an inversion in the hierarchy of the two principles of antiquity, “Take care of yourself” and “Know yourself.” In Greco-Roman culture, knowledge of oneself appeared as the consequence of the care of the self. In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle.
But what then is this confrontation below the language of reason? Where might this interrogation lead, following not reason in its horizontal becoming, but seeking to retrace in time this constant verticality, which, the length of Western culture, confronts it with what it is not, measuring it with its own extravagance?
History of Madness (1961)
The guillotine takes life almost without touching the body, just as prison deprives of liberty or a fine reduces wealth. It is intended to apply the law not so to a real body capable of feeling pain as to a juridical subject, the possessor, among other rights, of the right to exist it had to have the abstraction of the law itself.
Discipline and Punish (1977)