There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations

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.

There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

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

'The prison' begins well before its doors. It begins as soon as you leave your house - and even before.

Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.

it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime