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Michel Foucault cytaty
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Paul Michel Foucault – francuski filozof, historyk i socjolog. W latach 1970–1984 zasiadał w Collège de France na specjalnie stworzonej dla niego katedrze „Historia systemów myślenia”. Uznany przez The Times Higher Education Guide za najczęściej cytowanego autora w naukach humanistycznych w pierwszej dekadzie XXI wieku.

Zazwyczaj łączony z poststrukturalizmem i postmodernizmem, sam odżegnywał się od tych afiliacji, podkreślając przede wszystkim wpływ filozofii Nietzschego na swoją pracę naukową. Przejął od niego przede wszystkim „genealogiczną” metodę badania, wzorowaną na modelu zastosowanym przez Nietzschego w Z genealogii moralności, i zastosował ją w badaniu „genealogii wiedzy” – odżegnywał się tym samym od teleologicznego rozumienia historii. Swe zainteresowania badawcze kierował w stronę krytycznej analizy instytucji społecznych, takich jak psychiatria, system penitencjarny czy seksualność – dostrzegał w nich nierozerwalną nić łączącą wiedzę z władzą. Wikipedia  

✵ 15. Październik 1926 – 25. Czerwiec 1984
Michel Foucault Fotografia
Michel Foucault: 143 cytaty0 Polubień

Michel Foucault słynne cytaty

„Legalnie zabija się ludzi, którzy stanowią dla innych coś w rodzaju biologicznego zagrożenia.”

Michel Foucault Historia seksualności

Źródło: Historia seksualności

„Władzę suwerenną zastąpiła dziś władza pastoralna.”

Michel Foucault Historia seksualności

Źródło: Historia seksualności

„Masy najwyraźniej same dobrze wiedzą, o co chodzi, nie mają złudzeń – wiedzą znacznie lepiej od niego [intelektualisty] i z pewnością są w stanie wyrażać swoje poglądy.”

Michel Foucault

Źródło: Intelektualiści a władza (rozmowa między Michelem Foucault a Gilles’em Deluze’em), przeł., Sławomir Magala, „Miesięcznik Literacki”, nr 11/1985.

„Człowiek jest odkryciem niedawnym, jak wykazuje bez trudności archeologia naszego myślenia. Wykazuje też ona możliwość jego rychłego kresu.”

Michel Foucault

„Ani władza nie może być praktykowana bez wiedzy, ani wiedza nie może nie płodzić władzy.”

Michel Foucault

Źródło: Gry władzy, tłum. T. Komendant, [w:] Literatura na świecie, nr 6/1988.

Michel Foucault Cytaty o historii

„Starodawną potęgę śmierci, symbol władzy suwerennej, starannie pokrywa teraz administracja ciał i wyrachowane zarządzanie życiem.”

Michel Foucault Historia seksualności

Źródło: Historia seksualności

„Biowładza była, próżno w to wątpić, niezbędnym elementem rozwoju kapitalizmu – mógł przetrwać jedynie za cenę kontrolowanego wtłoczenia ciał w aparat wytwórczy i dostosowania zjawisk populacyjnych do procesów ekonomicznych.”

Michel Foucault Historia seksualności

Źródło: Historia seksualności

„Jedyny cel, jaki może wytknąć sobie rozum, wyznacza stan ciała ze względu na właściwą mu konieczność oczyszczenia.”

Michel Foucault Historia seksualności

Źródło: Historia seksualności

„Kapitalizm mógł przetrwać jedynie za cenę kontrolowanego wtłaczania ciał w aparat wytwórczy i dostosowania zjawisk populacyjnych do procesów ekonomicznych.”

Michel Foucault Historia seksualności

Źródło: Historia seksualności, t. 1 Wola wiedzy, tłum.B. Banasiak, K. Matuszewski, Czytelnik, Warszawa 2000.

Michel Foucault cytaty

„Wypada raczej uznać, że władza produkuje wiedzę (…); że władza i wiedza wprost się ze sobą wiążą; że nie ma relacji władzy bez skorelowanego z nimi pola wiedzy, ani też wiedzy, która nie zakłada i nie tworzy relacji władzy.”

Michel Foucault

Źródło: Nadzorować i karać. Narodziny więzienia, tłum. T. Komendant, Fundacja Aletheia, Warszawa 1998.

„Uprawianie seksu z osobą, którą się kocha, może być tak samo rutynowe, jak codzienne mycie zębów.”

Michel Foucault

„Francuski kapitalizm bardzo potrzebuje dryfującego znaczącego w postaci bezrobocia.(…) Z tej perspektywy zaczynamy widzieć jedność form represji: ograniczenia wobec przyjeżdżających do Francji cudzoziemców, skoro już stwierdzono, że najtrudniejsze i najbardziej niewdzięczne prace wykonują cudzoziemcy; następnie represje w fabrykach, bo Francuzów trzeba przyuczyć na nowo do cięższej pracy; walka z młodzieżą i represje w systemie oświatowym.”

Michel Foucault

Źródło: Intelektualiści a władza (rozmowa między Michelem Foucault a Gilles’em Deluze’em), przeł., Sławomir Magala, „Miesięcznik Literacki”, nr 11/1985.

„Jesteśmy poddani produkcji prawdy przez władzę i nie możemy sprawować władzy inaczej jak tylko przez produkcję prawdy.(…) Władza nigdy nie zaprzestaje swej ingerencji, swej inkwizycji, swej rejestracji prawdy. Ona instytucjonalizuje, profesjonalizuje i nagradza jej poszukiwanie.”

Michel Foucault

Źródło: Porządek dyskursu, tłum.M. Kozłowski, wyd.: Słowo/Obraz Terytoria, Gdańsk 2002.

„Przestępstwo jest zbyt pożyteczne, aby można było marzyć o tak niedorzecznej i tak w końcu niebezpiecznej sprawie, jak społeczeństwo bez przestępstw. Bez przestępstwa nie ma policji. Co pozwala ludności zaakceptować obecność policji, kontrolę policyjną, jeśli nie lęk przed przestępcą? To cudowna gratka. On i tylko on usprawiedliwia tę tak nową a tak potężną instytucję.”

Michel Foucault

Źródło: Gry władzy, tłum.T. Komendant, [w:] Literatura na świecie, nr 6/1988.

Michel Foucault: Cytaty po angielsku

“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.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 10

“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.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

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.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Part Four, Complete and austere institutions
Discipline and Punish (1977)

“Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977) as translated by Alan Sheridan, p. 228
Discipline and Punish (1977)

“When I was a student in the 1950s, I read Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty. When you feel an overwhelming influence, you try to open a window. Paradoxically enough, Heidegger is not very difficult for a Frenchman to understand. When every word is an enigma, you are in a not-too-bad position to understand Heidegger. Being and Time is difficult, but the more recent works are clearer. Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.”

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Michel Foucault

Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

“In the ceremonies of the public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, pp. 56

“I'm very proud that some people think that I'm a danger for the intellectual health of students. When people start thinking of health in intellectual activities, I think there is something wrong. In their opinion I am a dangerous man, since I am a crypto-Marxist, an irrationalist, a nihilist.”

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Michel Foucault

Truth, Power, Self : An Interview with Michel Foucault (25 October 1982)

“How to define the moment that I write?”

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Michel Foucault

Qui définit le moment où j'écris?
"Un cours inedit" in Magazine littéraire (May 1984), page 34.

“The most defenseless tenderness and the bloodiest of powers have a similar need of confession. Western man has become a confessing animal.”

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Michel Foucault

Vol. I, p. 59
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

“Navigation brought man face to face with the uncertainty of destiny, where each is left to himself and every departure might always be the last. The madman on his crazy boat sets sail for the other world, and it is from the other world that he comes when he disembarks. This enforced navigation is both rigorous division and absolute Passage, serving to underline in real and imaginary terms the liminal situation of the mad in medieval society. It was a highly symbolic role, made clear by the mental geography involved, where the madman was confined at the gates of the cities. His exclusion was his confinement, and if he had no prison other than the threshold itself he was still detained at this place of passage. In a highly symbolic position he is placed on the inside of the outside, or vice versa. A posture that is still his today, if we admit that what was once the visible fortress of social order is now the castle of our own consciousness.”

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Michel Foucault

Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
History of Madness (1961)

“At the end of the Middle Ages, leprosy disappeared from the Western world. In the margins of the community, at the gates of cities, there stretched wastelands which sickness had ceased to haunt but had left sterile and long uninhabitable. For centuries is, these reaches would belong to the non-human. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century, they would wait, soliciting with strange incantations a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.”

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Michel Foucault

Part One: 1. Stultifera Navis
History of Madness (1961)

“Discipline 'makes' individuals; it is the specific technique of a power that regards individuals both as objects and as instruments of its exercise. It is not a triumphant power…it is a modest, suspicious power, which functions as a calculated, but permanent economy.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

“A utopia of judicial reticence: take away life, but prevent the patient from feeling it; deprive the prisoner of all rights, but do not inflict pain; impose penalties free of all pain. Recourse to psycho-pharmacology and to various physiological ‘disconnectors’, even if it is temporary, is a logical consequence of this ‘non-corporal’ penalty.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The Spectacle of the Scaffold

“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.”

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Michel Foucault

Part Two: 2. The Transcendence of Delirium
History of Madness (1961)

“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.”

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Michel Foucault

“Technologies of the Self,” Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), p. 228

“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.”

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Michel Foucault

L’important, c’est que le sexe n’ait pas été seulement affaire de sensation et de plaisir, de loi ou d’interdiction, mais aussi de vrai et de faux.
Vol. I, p. 76
History of Sexuality (1976–1984)

“The condemned man found himself transformed into a hero by the sheer extend of his widely advertised crimes, and sometimes the affirmation of his belated repentance. Against the law, against the rich, the powerful, the magistrates, the constabulary or the watch, against taxes and their collectors, he appeared to have waged a struggle with which one all too easily identified. The proclamation of these crimes blew up to epic proportions the tiny struggle that passed unperceived in everyday life. If the condemned man was shown to be repentant, accepting the verdict, asking both God and man for forgiveness for his crimes, it was as if he had come through some process of purification: he died, in his own way, like a saint.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One: The Spectacle of the scaffold, pp. 67

“The pastorate was formed against a sort of intoxication of religious behavior, examples of which are found throughout the Middle East in the second, third, and fourth centuries, and to which certain Gnostic sects in particular bear striking and indisputable testimony. In at least some of these Gnostic sects, in fact, the identification of matter with evil, and as absolute evil, obviously entailed certain consequences. This might be, for example, a kind of vertigo or enchantment provoked by a sort of unlimited asceticism that could lead to suicide: freeing oneself from matter as quickly as possible. There is also the idea, the theme, of destroying matter through the exhaustion of the evils it contains, of committing every possible sin, going to the very end of the domain of evil opened up by matter, and thus destroying matter. Let us sin, then, and sin to infinity. There is also the theme of the nullification of the world of the law, to destroy which one must first destroy the law, that is to say, break every law. One must respond to every law established by the world, or by the powers of the world, by violating it, systematically breaking the law and in effect, overthrowing the reign of the one who created the world.”

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Michel Foucault

Lecture 8 (1 March 1978), p. 195
Security, Population, Territory (1978)

“He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the contraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Part Three, Panopticism
Discipline and Punish (1977)

“Absurdity destroys the and of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up.”

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Michel Foucault

Preface
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)

“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 use: I try to figure out what’s at stake. But to question the relations of power in the most scrupulous and attentive manner possible, looking into all the domains of its exercise, that’s not the same thing as constructing a mythology of power as the beast of the apocalypse.”

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Michel Foucault

"Power, Moral Values, and the Intellectual", interview in History of the Present 4 (Spring 1988)

“The critical ontology of ourselves has to be considered not, certainly, as a theory, a doctrine, nor even as a permanent body of knowledge that is accumulating; it has to be conceived as an attitude, an ethos, a philosophical life in which the critique of what we are is at one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits that are imposed on us and an experiment with the possibility of going beyond them.”

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Michel Foucault

What is Enlightenment? (1978)

“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.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Two, pp.80

“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.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

“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.”

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Michel Foucault

As quoted in Who's Who in Contemporary Gay & Lesbian History: From World War II to the Present Day (2001) by Robert Aldrich and Gary Wotherspoon ISBN 041522974X

“If torture was so strongly embedded in legal practice, it was because it revealed truth and showed the operation of power. It assured the articulation of the written on the oral, the secret on the public, the procedure of investigation on the operation of the confession; it made it possible to reproduce the crime on the visible body of the criminal.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, pp.55

“The different pieces of evidence did not constitute so many neutral elements, until such time as they could be gathered together into a single body of evidence that would bring the final certainty of guilt. Each piece of evidence aroused a particular degree of abomination. Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognize a guilty person. Thus a semi-proof did not leave the suspect innocent until such time as it was completed; it made him semi-guilty; slight evidence of a serious crime marked someone as slightly criminal. In short, penal demonstration did not obey a dualistic system: true or false; but a principle of continuous gradation; a degree reached in the demonstration already formed a degree of guilt and consequently involved a degree of punishment.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter One, The body of the condemned, pp.23

“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.”

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Michel Foucault

Preface to 1961 edition
History of Madness (1961)

“Above the punitive city hangs this iron spider; and the criminal who is to be thus crucified by the new law is parricide.”

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Michel Foucault książka Discipline and Punish

Źródło: Discipline and Punish (1977), Chapter Three, The Gentle Way in Punishment

“In France at least, the history of science and thought gives pride of place sciences, sciences of the necessary, all close to philosophy: one can observe in their history the almost uninterrupted emergence of truth and pure reason. The other disciplines, however - those, for example, that concern living beings, languages, or economic facts - are considered too tinged with empirical thought, too exposed to the vagaries of chance or imagery to age old traditions and external events, for it to be supposed that their history could be anything other irregular. At most, they are expected to provide evidence of a state of mind, an intellectual fashion, a mixture of archaism and bold conjecture, of intuition and blindness. But what if empirical knowledge, at a given time and in a given culture, did possess a well defined regularity.”

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Michel Foucault

Foreword to the English edition
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)

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