Michel Foucault Quotes on Politics
Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975) and the History of Sexuality volumes develop a power-analysis that breaks decisively with the juridical model of political philosophy. Power is not principally repressive law issued by a sovereign but a productive, capillary, immanent network of disciplinary techniques — surveillance, normalization, examination — that constitute subjects rather than constraining a pre-existing freedom. The late lectures Society Must Be Defended, Security, Territory, Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics extend the analysis to biopower — the modern political concern with managing populations as biological entities — and to neoliberal governmentality, which makes the entrepreneurial self the principal target of its programs.
Quotes
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Attributed to Michel Foucault:
“Where there is power, there is resistance.”
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Attributed to Michel Foucault:
“Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”
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Attributed to Michel Foucault:
“Visibility is a trap.”
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“Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.”
p. 785 -
Attributed to Michel Foucault:
“Modern man is much sooner judged than seen.”
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Attributed to Michel Foucault:
“The strategic adversary is fascism: the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour.”
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“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.”
Michel Foucault, quoted in Subrata Chattopadhyay Banerjee - The Development of Aryan Invasion Theory in India, A Critique of Nineteenth-Century Social Constructionism-Springer (2020) -
“Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual", interview in History of the Present 4 (Spring 1988)”
Sometimes, because my position has not been made clear enough, people think I'm a sort of radical anarchist who has an absolute hatred of power. No! What I am trying to do is to approach this extremely important and tangled phenomenon in our society, the exercise of power, with the most reflective, and I would say prudent attitude. Prudent in my analysis, in the moral and theoretical postulates I