What is peculiar to modern societies is not that they consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.

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.

What makes power hold good, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn't only weigh on us as a force that says no, but that it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression

[Knowledge is governed not by] a theory of knowledge, but by a theory of discursive practice.

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

Our society is not one of spectacle but of surveillance.

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