Law Quotes by Michel Foucault

10 Law quotes by Michel Foucault

All Law quotes Michel Foucault’s page

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The court is the bureaucracy of the law. If you bureaucratise popular justice then you give it the form of a court.

Michel Foucault

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Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for its power to work redemption. It was not a law…

Michel Foucault

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Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie…

Michel Foucault

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Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which the Western thought has so long held…

Michel Foucault

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Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts,…

Michel Foucault

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My hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function…

Michel Foucault

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[T]hus one should not think that desire is repressed, for the simple reason that the law is what constitutes both desire and…

Michel Foucault

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Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations,…

Michel Foucault

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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…

Michel Foucault

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... we are obliged to produce the truth by the power that demands truth and needs it in order to function: we are constrained, we are condemned to admit the truth or to discover it. Power constantly asks questions and questions us; it constantly investigates and records; it institutionalizes the search for the truth, professionalizes it, and rewards it. ...…

Michel Foucault

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More by Michel Foucault

One should try to locate power at the extreme of its exercise, where it is always less legal in character.

Michel Foucault

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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:…

Michel Foucault

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“But a punishment like forced labour or even imprisonment – mere loss of liberty – has never functioned without a certain additional element of punishment that certainly concerns the body itself: rationing of food, sexual deprivation, corporal punishment, solitary confinement … There remains, therefore, a trace of ‘torture’ in the modern mechanisms of criminal justice – a trace that has…

Michel Foucault

Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.

Michel Foucault

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I'm no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.

Michel Foucault

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Let us ask... how things work at the level of on-going subjugation, at the level of those continuous and uninterrupted processes which subject our bodies, govern our gestures, dictate our behaviors, etc... we should try to discover how it is that subjects are gradually, progressively, really and materially constituted through a multiplicity of organisms, forces, energies, materials, desires, thoughts, etc.…

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…

Michel Foucault

“It was a matter of showing by what conjunctions a whole set of practices-- from the moment they became coordinated with a regime of truth––was able to make what does not exist (madness, disease, delinquency, sexuality), nonetheless become something, something however that continues not to exist. That is to say, what I would like to show is not how an…

Michel Foucault

“The preferred medications were those that forestalled corruption. We know 'as a result of more than three thousand years of experience that Myrrh and…

Michel Foucault