‘[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. …
Delacampagne But don’t the public expect the critic to provide them with precise assessments as to the value of a work? Foucault I don’t know whether the public do or do not expect the critic to judge works or authors. Judges were there, I think, before they were able to say what they wanted. It …
Lord knows how many times myths, legends, stories and tales – or anything else we generally consider ‘untrue’ – have been subjected to ethnological study. But after all, isn’t truth-telling also embedded in the dense and complex tissue of ritual? It too has been accompanied by numerous beliefs, and accorded strange powers. So perhaps there …
Philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level and in every form in which it exists, whether political, economic, sexual, institutional, or what have you. To a certain extent, this critical function of philosophy derives from the Socratic injunction “Take care of yourself,” in other words, “Make freedom your foundation, through the …
‘I don’t think there is actually a sovereign founding subject, a universal form of subject that one might find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile towards this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices …
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