Fuck Yeah Michel Foucault

Blog about the life, the times and the work of one of the most important intellectuals of the twentieth century.

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The 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison, 1976.

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“Orthopaedics or the art of preventing and correcting deformities of the body in children, 1749.”

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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.

Michel Foucault.

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The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.

Michel Foucault, 1977.

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Clip from documentary in French. Translations would be much loved...

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I think that the word 'rationalisation' is dangerous. What we have to do is analyse specific rationalities rather than always invoking the progress of rationalisation in general.

Michel Foucault, 'The subject and power'.

[fuckyeahmichelfoucault-blog]

I was telling you earlier about the three elements in my morals. They are (1) the refusal to accept as self-evident the things that are proposed to us; (2) the need to analyse and to know, since we can accomplish nothing without reflection and understanding thus, the principle of curiosity; and (3) the principle of innovation: to seek out in our reflection those things that have never been thought or imagined. Thus: refusal, curiosity, innovation.

Michel Foucault.

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What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?

Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 1991 [1984].

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presented without comment.

^except for that one.

^and that one.

^and tha—- oh god.

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“A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself… It is strange that it was Proust, an author thought to be a pure intellectual, who said it so clearly: treat my book as a pair of glasses directed to the outside; if they don’t suit you, find another pair; I leave it to you to find your own instrument, which is necessarily an investment for combat.”

- Gilles Deleuze

Above photograph: Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault. Almost too much subversive and revolutionary spirit for a photo to handle. ALSO I LOVE HOW FOUCAULT HAS A HALO OVER HIS HEAD. PATRON SAINT OF CRITICAL THEORY.