Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian, writer, and professor, born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France.
Foucault was educated at the Lycée Henri-IV and went on to study at the École Normale Supérieure and the University of Paris. He worked as a professor and university teacher, writing in French throughout his career. Among the books he authored are The Order of Things, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality. He also wrote L'usage des plaisirs, which forms part of The History of Sexuality project.
Foucault died on June 25, 1984, in the 13th arrondissement of Paris. His published output spanned philosophy, history, and writing more broadly, and the works he produced — from Discipline and Punish to The History of Sexuality — reflect his consistent activity across those overlapping roles. It is this combination of philosophical inquiry and historical writing that runs through the titles he left behind.
Quotes by Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault's insights on:
It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring.
The book is not simply the object that one holds in one's hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse.
My hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus.
This non-proletarianised plebs has been racialist when it has been colonialist; it has been nationalist - chauvinist - when it has been armed; and it has been fascist when it has become the police force.These ideological effects on the plebs have been uncontestable and profound.
For the bourgeoisie, the main danger against which it had to be protected, that which had to be avoided at all costs, was armed uprising, was the armed people, was the workers taking to the streets in an assault against the government.
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.
We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the 'social-worker'-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.
The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred.
The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.