Quote reblogged from A la recherche du temps perdu with 843 notes
I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming that I couldn’t survive it. I would die.
Michel Foucault, from a 1983 interview collected in Politics, Philosophy, Culture
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Quote reblogged from Kult des Fragments with 65 notes
I can’t help but dream about a kind of criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would fight fires, watch grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea foam in the breeze and scatter it. It would multiply not judgements but signs of existence; it would summon them, drag them from their sleep. Perhaps it would invent them sometimes — all the better. Criticism that hands down sentences sends me to sleep; I’d like a criticism of scintillating leaps of the imagination. It would not be sovereign or dressed in red. It would bear the lightning of possible storms.
Michel Foucault: The masked philosopher. In: Ethics: Subjectivity and truth, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York 1994, p. 87-94.
Source: ratak-monodosico
Quote reblogged from Kult des Fragments with 40 notes
In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent.
Michel Foucault
Source: chaoticoncentration
Quote reblogged from A la recherche du temps perdu with 36 notes
The madman, understood not as one who is sick but as an established and maintained deviant, as an indispensable cultural function, has become, in Western experience, the man of primitive resemblances. This character, as he is depicted in the novels of plays of the Baroque age, and as he was gradually institutionalized right up to the advent of nineteenth-century psychiatry, is the man who is alienated in analogy. He is the disordered player of the Same and the Other. He takes things for what they are not, and people one for another; he cuts his friends and recognizes complete strangers; he thinks he is unmasking when, in fact, he is putting on a mask.
Michel Foucault, from The Order of Things
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