The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.
control description power

About This Quote

About Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault was a 20th-century French philosopher. Paul-Michel Foucault was a French historian of ideas and philosopher, who was also an author, literary critic, political activist, and teacher. Foucault's theories primarily addressed the relationships between power versus knowledge and liberty, and he analyzed how they are used as a form of social control through multiple institutions. Read more on Wikipedia →

Themes

  • Power — The dynamics of influence, authority, and leadership

More quotes by Michel Foucault

“Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had placed within reach and in sight of human beings the things it was necessary for them to know.”
— Michel Foucault
human-knowledge nature secrets

“Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable.”
— 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 exploit...”
— Michel Foucault
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“After Sade, violence, life and death, desire, and sexuality will extend, below the level of representation, an immense expanse of darkness, which we are now attempting to recover...in our discourse...”
— Michel Foucault
nature sade sexuality

“Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of ...”
— Michel Foucault
censorship foucault history philosophy

“The necessity of reform mustnt be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tel...”
— Michel Foucault
activism criticism philosophy
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“What a curious power words have.”
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