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.
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.
Where there is power, there is resistance.
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.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same.
Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting.
Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with it’s thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything.
How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?
Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.
Search for what is good and strong and beautiful in your society and elaborate from there. Push outward. Always create from what you already have. Then you will know what to do.
Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. More than one person, doubtless like me, writes in order to have no face.
From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
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.
I’m no prophet. My job is making windows where there were once walls.
I am hopelessly in love with a memory. An echo from another time, another place.
The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is the phenomena of the library.
Knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.
Death left its old tragic heaven and became the lyrical core of man: his invisible truth, his visible secret.