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Ideas of Michel Foucault, by Text

[French, 1926 - 1984, Born at Poitiers. Professor at the Collège de France, Paris.]

1971 Nietzsche, Genealogy, History
p.86 p.45 22235 Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble)
1976 Truth and Power (interview)
p.114 p.114 15037 Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development?
p.115 p.115 15038 Structuralism systematically abstracted the event from sciences, and even from history
p.116 p.116 15039 History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles
p.117 p.117 15040 Marxists denounced power as class domination, but never analysed its mechanics
p.120 p.120 15041 Power doesn't just repress, but entices us with pleasure, artefacts, knowledge and discourse
p.131 p.131 15043 Every society has a politics of truth, concerning its values, functions, prestige and mechanisms
p.131 p.131 15042 Truth doesn't arise from solitary freedom, but from societies with constraints
p.132 p.132 15044 'Truth' is the procedures for controlling which statements are acceptable
1977 Discipline and Punish
p.81 21946 Prisons gradually became our models for schools, hospitals and factories [Gutting]
p.88 21947 Power is localised, so we either have totalitarian centralisation, or local politics [Gutting]
1978 works
p.9 21116 Power is used to create identities and ways of life for other people [Shorten]
p.12 21939 The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Gutting]
p.35 21941 Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Gutting]
p.53 21942 Foucault challenges knowledge in psychology and sociology, not in the basic sciences [Gutting]
p.76 21945 Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Gutting]
EW III:449 p.448 21940 Nature is not the basis of rights, but the willingness to risk death in asserting them
1980 Power/Knowledge
p.12 8991 Foucault can't accept that power is sometimes decent and benign [Scruton]
1982 Space, Knowledge and Power (interview)
p.358 p.358 15045 The big issue since the eighteenth century has been: what is Reason? Its effect, limits and dangers?
1982 What is Critique?
p.28 p.80 22236 The big question of the Renaissance was how to govern everything, from the state to children
1983 On the Genealogy of Ethics
p.253 p.253 7498 Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex
p.260 p.260 7500 Early Greeks cared about city and companions; later Greeks concentrated on the self
p.261 p.261 7501 Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art?
1984 Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom
p.282 p.282 7418 The idea of liberation suggests there is a human nature which has been repressed
p.284 p.284 7419 Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom
p.286 p.286 7420 When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos
p.290 p.290 7422 A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations
p.293 p.293 7423 Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked
p.296 p.296 7424 Saying games of truth were merely power relations would be a horrible exaggeration
p.298 p.298 7425 The aim is not to eliminate power relations, but to reduce domination
p.300 p.300 7426 Critical philosophy is what questions domination at every level