“There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks,

and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting
at all.”

― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 2: The Use of Pleasure

https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/1260.Michel_Foucault

it helped to constitute and organize an entire field of knowledge about language; it helped discipline the judgment, and thereby
the response, of students and teachers; and, in so doing, it revealed its links to forms of power-such as teaching-that have effects
upon the actions of others.

we choose, easily trace this pattern, in which an intellectually specialized language

of a professional discipline is constellated and made functional; we can see
it extended both into a broader coherence with other discourses constituting
other fields and into the processes which institutionalize discourses. When their
"discourse" about language and criticism became institutionalized, it effectively
produced the language of professional literary criticism and, accordingly, helped
make up an academic discipline by giving it some of the characteristics of other
intellectual fields already professionally organized. As a result, criticism joined in
the general disciplinary project of producing and regulating the movement of
knowledge, the forms of language, and the training of minds and bodies. Professionalized
academic literary criticism came into being. (p. 52) BOVE - DISCOURSE

https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ugalib/detail.action?docID=1813090#

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly

what I am. The main interest in life and work is
to become someone else that you were not in
the beginning.

Search for what is good and strong and

beautiful in your society and elaborate from
there. Push outward. Always create from what
you already have. Then you will know what
to do.

What strikes me is the fact that in our society,

art has become something which is related only
to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That
art is something which is specialized or which
is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t
everyone’s life become a work of art? Why
should the lamp or the house be an art object,
but not our life?

The judges of normality are present

everywhere. We are in the society of the
teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-
judge, the social worker -judge.

If you knew when you began a book what you

would say at the end, do you think that you
would have the courage to write it? What is
true for writing and for a love relationship is
true also for life. The game is worthwhile
insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

I 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.

The work of an intellectual is not to mould the

political will of others; it is, through the
analyses that he does in his own field, to re-
examine evidence and assumptions, to shake
up habitual ways of working and thinking, to
dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-
evaluate rules and institutions and to
participate in the formation of a political will
(where he has his role as citizen to play).

The imaginary is not formed in opposition to

reality as its denial or compensation; it grows
among signs, from book to book, in the
interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is
born and takes shape in the interval between
books. It is the phenomena of the library.

We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the

bursting outward of their force: not in books
expressing them, but in events manifesting this
force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for
or against them.

Nature, keeping only useless secrets, had

placed within reach and in sight of human
beings the things it was necessary for them
to know.