Thought does exist, both beyond and underneath systems and edifices of discourse. It is something that is often hidden but always drives everyday behaviors. There is always a little thought occurring even in the most stupid institutions; there is always thought even in silent habits. Criticism consists in uncovering that thought and trying to change …
[…] this problem of being “on time” and not being on time as you know was one of the main problems in Greek ethics— the notion of kairos. Kairos is the right moment. In the first Greek texts, the problem for ethics was choosing the right moment to do something. […] In general, I think …
Editor: These passages are from Foucault’s original manuscript for “What is critique?” but weren’t included in his presentation to the Société française de Philosophie – the version that was published in 1978 in French and later in two separate English translations in 1996 and 1997. These passages appear in the new edition and translation of …
L’abécédaire de Michel Foucault. Revue Ballast 25 janvier 2023 […] nous prolongeons la discussion en 26 lettres. Anormal : « Par pensée médicale, j’entends une façon de percevoir les choses qui s’organise autour de la norme, c’est-à-dire qui essaie de partager ce qui est normal de ce qui est anormal, qui n’est pas tout à …
‘[Raymond Roussel] said that after his first book he expected that the next morning there would be a kind of aura around his person and that everyone in the street would be able to see that he had written a book. This is the obscure desire harboured by everyone who writes. It is true that …
When I wrote [History of Madness], in Poland in 1958, antipsychiatry didn’t exist in Europe, and in any case it wasn’t an attack on psychiatry for the very good reason that the book stops at the very start of the nineteenth century – I don’t even fully examine the work of Etienne Esquirol. Despite all …
Ultimately, every insignificant event that took place in the heart of the countryside is still in some way inscribed in the bodies of twentieth-century urban inhabitants. There is a tiny element of the peasantry, an obscure drama from the fields and the forest, the barn, that is still inscribed somewhere, has marked our bodies in …
There are games of truth in which truth is a construction and others in which it is not. One can have, for example, a game of truth that consists of describing things in such and such a way: a person giving an anthropological description of a society supplies not a construction but a description, which …
‘I don’t write a book so that it will be the final word; I write a book so that other books are possible, not necessarily written by me’. Michel Foucault (1994) [1971] ‘Entretien avec Michel Foucault’. In Dits et Ecrits vol II (of 4 volume version). Paris: Gallimard, pp. 157-74. (This passage trans. Clare O’Farrell).
‘What I am trying to do is the history of the relationship that thought maintains with truth, the history of thought insofar as it is thought about the truth. All those who say that for me truth doesn’t exist are simple-minded.’ Michel Foucault. (1996) [1984]. The concern for truth. In Foucault Live. collected Interviews, 1961-1984. …
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