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If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will n...more

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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 comple...more

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Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole...more

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The strategic adversary is fascism... the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to d...more

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Knowledge is not made for understanding it is made for cutting.

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In a sense, I am a moralist, insofar as I believe that one of the tasks, one of the meanings of human existence—the source of human freedom—is never t...more

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The institution of monarchy developed during the Middle Ages against the backdrop of the previously endemic struggles between feudal power agencies. T...more

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We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms, it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’... in fact power produces, it produce...more

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The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The dis...more

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There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at ...more

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The fact that the crime and the punishment were related and bound up in the form of atrocity was not the result of some obscurely accepted law of reta...more

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I'm struck by the difficulty I had in formulating it. When I think back now, I ask myself what else it was that I was talking about in Madness and Civ...more

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Where there is power, there is resistance.

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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 the lack on which it is p...more

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This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—...more