Little information is published on prisons, it is one of the hidden regions of our social system, one of the dark zones of our life.

If repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost.

Man is a thinking being. The way he thinks is related to society, politics, economics, and history and is also related to very general and universal categories and formal structures. But thought is something other than societal relations.

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

If I open a book and see that the author is accusing an adversary of "infantile leftism" I shut it again right away. That's not my way of doing things; I don't belong to the world of people who do things that way. I insist on this difference as something essential: a whole morality is at stake; the one that concerns the search for truth and the relation to the other.

It might be said that all knowledge is linked to the essential forms of cruelty.

...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.