People will be surprised at the eagerness with which we went aboutpretending to rouse from its slumber a sexuality which everyยญthing-our discourses, our customs, our institutions, our regulations, our knowledges-was busy producing in the light of day and broadcasting to noisy accompaniment.
Michel FoucaultThe intellectual was rejected and persecuted at the precise moment when the facts became incontrovertible, when it was forbidden to say that the emperor had no clothes.
Michel FoucaultI 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.
Michel FoucaultDo 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.
Michel FoucaultIf 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.
Michel FoucaultTo seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles "in advance" a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.
Michel Foucault