But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

I'm not making a problem out of a personal question; I make of a personal question an absence of a problem.

Politics is not what it pretends to be, the expression of a collective will. Politics breathes well only where this will is multiple, hesitant, confused, and obscure even to itself.

Sexual behavior is not, as is too often assumed, a superimposition of, on the one hand, desires which derive from natural instincts, and, on the other hand, of permissive or restrictive laws which tell us what we should or shouldn't do. Sexual behavior is more than that.

Truth is not by nature free - nor error servile - but that its production is thoroughly imbued with relations of power.

Relations of power "are indissociable from a discourse of truth, and they can neither be established nor function unless a true discourse is produced, accumulated, put into circulation, and set to work. Power cannot be exercised unless a certain economy of discourses of truth functions in, on the basis of, and thanks to, that power."

Truth is undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history