Michel Foucault - Knowledge Quotes

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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.

Michel Foucault
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

Michel Foucault
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.

Michel Foucault
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.

Michel Foucault
If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

Michel Foucault
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.

Michel Foucault
What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression

Michel Foucault
It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

Michel Foucault
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.

Michel Foucault
Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.

Michel Foucault
The university and in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class.

Michel Foucault
One thing in any case is certain: man is neither the oldest nor the most constant problem that has been posed for human knowledge.

Michel Foucault
Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, help to support the political power. It's also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

Michel Foucault
People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which every­thing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.

Michel Foucault