Foucault Quotes

1. "I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's. biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field."
Author: Donna J. Haraway

2. "W ksiazce Foucaulta mowa jest czesto o "antropologicznej skonczonosci". Wyobrazam sobie, jak tego rodzaju formulki moga dzialac na mlodych. Oczywiscie brzmi to uczeniej niz "nedza czlowieka", "znikomosc trwania" ludzkich dziejów. Z wszystkich szalbierstw najgorsze jest jezykowe, bo najtrudniej dostrzegalne dla oglupionych ludzi naszej epoki. Trzeba powiedziec, ze droge otwarl Heidegger i ze jesli jakis filozof chce doswiadczyc ostracyzmu, na wlasnej skórze przezyc wymieniona wyzej "skonczonosc", to wystarczy mu odrzucic zargon i uzyc potocznego, sensownego jezyka. Automatycznie wytworzy sie wokól niego pustka.W sensie literackim rzadki blad warto jest wiecej od znanej, wypróbowanej i banalnej prawdy; w sensie duchowym jest wprost przeciwnie.Niezwyklosc nie ma zadnej wartosci na plaszczyznie duchowej. Liczy sie tylko glebia, stopien poglebienia danego przezycia."
Author: Emil Cioran

3. "The velocity of light is one of the most important of the fundamental constants of Nature. Its measurement by Foucault and Fizeau gave as the result a speed greater in air than in water, thus deciding in favor of the undulatory and against the corpuscular theory. Again, the comparison of the electrostatic and the electromagnetic units gives as an experimental result a value remarkably close to the velocity of light–a result which justified Maxwell in concluding that light is the propagation of an electromagnetic disturbance. Finally, the principle of relativity gives the velocity of light a still greater importance, since one of its fundamental postulates is the constancy of this velocity under all possible conditions."
Author: Foucault

4. "Se se adora o deus compósito dos processos históricos, está-se condenado a negar a Shakespeare sua palpável supremacia estética, a realmente gritante originalidade de suas peças. A originalidade torna-se um equivalente literário de termos como empreendimento individual, autossuficiência e competição, que não fazem a felicidade dos corações feministas, afrocentristas, marxistas, neo-historicistas foucaultianos ou desconstrutores - de todos que descrevi como membros da Escola do Ressentimento."
Author: Harold Bloom

5. "Nossos atuais neo-historicistas, com sua curiosa mistura de Foucault e Marx, são apenas um episódio bem menor na interminável história do platonismo. Platão esperava, banindo o poeta, banir também o tirano. Banir Shakespeare, ou antes reduzi-lo a seus contextos, não vai livrar-nos de nossos tiranos."
Author: Harold Bloom

6. "In a sense,' Foucault concluded with a flourish, ‘all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys."
Author: James Miller

7. "If I have so far argued that Foucault is a kind of closet liberal and thus deeply modern, I need to be equally critical of evangelical (and especially American) Christianity's modernity and its appropriation of Enlightenment notions of the autonomous self. Indeed, many otherwise orthodox Christians, who recoil at the notion of theological liberalism, have unwittingly adopted notions of freedom and autonomy that are liberal to the core. Averse to hierarchies and control, contemporary evangelicalism thrives on autonomy: the autonomy of the nondenominational church, at a macrocosmic level, and the autonomy of the individual Christian, at the microcosmic level. And it does not seem to me that the emerging church has changed much on this score; indeed, some elements of emergent spirituality are intensifications of this affirmation of autonomy and a laissez-faire attitude with respect to institutions."
Author: James K.A. Smith

8. "Madeline began hearing people saying "Derrida". She heard them saying "Lyotard" and "Foucault" and "Deleuze" and "Baudrillard". That most of these people were those she instinctually disapproved of- upper-middle-class kids who wore Doc Martens and anarchist symbols- made Madeline dubious about the value of their enthusiasm."
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides

9. "With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes."
Author: John Rogers Searle

10. "I rehearsed Foucault's argument that the presence of madness on our doorstep is good for us, for it reminds us the life we live is only one among several human possibilities."
Author: Michael Greenberg

11. "I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I'd dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing."
Author: Michael Gira

12. "Given Loughner's obsession with meaninglessness and language, maybe Foucault & Derrida deserve some fault here, too."
Author: Walter Kirn

13. "Writers do not write what they want, they write what they can. When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who'd briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life. And now, when I finish a long day of CNN-related fear and loathing mixed with eyeballing my own resolutely white screen, I do not crawl into bed with 500-page comic novels about "multicultural" London. I read Carver. Julio Cortázar. Amis's essays. Baldwin. Lorrie Moore. Capote. Saramago. Larkin. Wodehouse. Anything, anything at all, that doesn't sound like me."
Author: Zadie Smith

Foucault Quotes Pictures