Everything I do, I do in order that it may be of use.
Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will
be the end.
There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine.
I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest
in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
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.
People know what they do; frequently they know why they do what they do;
but what they don't know is what what they do does. [JLJ ! It is someone else's job to know what what you do does, and this
person knows what what you do does. This is because he knows what he does, and he knows why he knows what he does. You don't
have to know what he knows, in order to know what you do, or why you do what you do. In fact, if he knows what what you do
does, he doesn't need to know what you do, so long as he knows what what you do does, and you know what you do. However, this
does not address what what you do did, or what what you do could do. One could also ask, legitimately, what what what
they do does does.]
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.
[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 the first text one writes is neither
written for others, nor because one is what one is: one writes to become other than what one is. One tries to modify one's
way of being through the act of writing.
...what defines a relationship of power is that it is a
mode of action that does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action
upon an action, on possible or actual future or present actions. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things;
it forces, it bends, it breaks, it destroys, or it closes off all possibilities.
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
analyze 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.
There is no power relation without the correlative
constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power
relations
power... is... a machine in which everyone is caught, those who exercise
power just as much as those over whom it is exercised... it becomes a machinery that no one owns.
If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you
think that you would have the courage to write it?
[Wikipedia entry]
[Foucault] desired his books "to be a kind of tool-box others can rummage
through to find a tool they can use however they wish in their own area… I don't write for an audience, I write for
users, not readers."
His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse have been widely influential
in academic circles
