“The political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality which has been imposed on us for several centuries.” – Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”
Category: Lit & Crit
“Since Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment—that is, since the development of the modern state and the political management of society—the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality. Which is a rather high expectation.” – Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”
“The Greek wise man, the Jewish prophet, the Roman legislator are still models that haunt those, who today, practice the profession of speaking and writing.” – Michel Foucault, Telos 161
“Although almost all of the intellectuals in France have felt, since the revolution, that society is in a major crisis which puts it in peril, there is presumably a consensus among administrators, expressed in their memos to each other, that things are basically in hand and that the general welfare and productivity of the population is constantly improving. It should be obvious that, even if there were a general consensus as to the state of the society, this would only prove that an orthodoxy had taken hold, not that the sense of things had assumed the status of objective truth.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do does.” – Michel Foucault (quoted by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics)
“Power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.” – Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction (trans. Robert Hurley)
“The rationality of the abominable is a fact of contemporary history. But this does not give to irrationality any special rights.” – Michel Foucault (quoted in L’Impossible Prison, trans. unknown)
“The world is not a play which simply masks a truer reality that exists behind the scenes. It is as it appears.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“The story of history is one of accidents, dispersion, chance events, lies—not the lofty development of Truth or the concrete embodiment of Freedom.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“Once man sees himself as involved in the world, and for that very reason its sovereign, he enters into a strange relation with his own involvements. His use of a language that he does not master, his inherence in a living organism he does not fully penetrate with thought, and the desires that he cannot control must be taken to be the basis of his ability to think and act. If man is to be intelligible to himself, this unthought must be ultimately accessible to thought and dominated in action, yet insofar as this unthought in its obscurity is precisely the condition of possibility of thought and action it can never be fully absorbed into the cogito.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“Man errs. Man does not merely stray into errancy. He is always astray in errancy.” – Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings (ed. David Farrell Krell)
“Women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“Romance should never begin with sentiment. It should begin with science and end with a settlement.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“It is the growth of the moral sense in women that makes marriage such a hopeless, one-sided institution.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us—else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive. All lives, save loveless lives, true Love should pardon.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“Life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“It is always worth while asking a question, though it is not always worth while answering one.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“When the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage.” – Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
“We have lost the symbolic value of the family meal; our festal days no longer remind us of human continuity or a vie antérieure common to all, but are monstrously corrupted and humiliated by a consumer society. The institutions we have devised to make daily life more harmonious continue to impose themselves as obstacles between feeling and value. We live with objects so secularised that we can only suppose behind them a void, an absence. The first result is that increasingly meaning becomes not a natural aura surrounding objects, events, and relationships but the work of will, spasmodic and synthetic. Meaning is invented, instigated, and produced by an imagination determined upon that labour.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“It is not the purpose of imagination to act as cheerleader for the spirit of the age but to find or make a place in aesthetic forms for values which the spirit of the age cannot even recognise. Increasingly, fundamental values must be apprehended as living beneath or beyond the structure of needs and drives which, in a consumer society, constitutes normal life. There are values so alien to those of any actual society that they can be sustained only in effigy as the virtualities of artistic form: this is the role of form, to preserve as fundamental truths the values which are otherwise homeless. So it is that the artist has been driven into the position of writing against time in the desperate hope of redeeming time.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“Writers accept the limitation of words at least in theory, though they struggle to circumvent it in practice; they know that words serve two masters, the purity of the work of art and the impurity of common use. Words used with pure intention drag impure allegiance into the sanctuary of art; there is no help for this situation. The novelist makes his fiction, and the normal means is by reciting a story, because stories, like lives, are temporal and they must begin and end. If he wants something more subtle, the novelist secretes it in the texture of his story. In return for the story, the available part of fiction, the novelist claims the right to qualify his report, insinuating doubts and hesitations where the story would run boldly from one episode to the next.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“The essential power of imagination, the quality of spirit, is the power of making fictions and making sense of life by that means. Fiction is the most available form of freedom, freedom of feeling and action.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“There should be a day in every year when consciousness allows itself to be suspended by fact in a Mardi Gras of mere reality.” – Denis Donoghue, The Sovereign Ghost
“The sick do not ask if the hand that smooths their pillow is pure, nor the dying care if the lips that touch their brow have known the kiss of sin.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“Men marry because they are tired; women because they are curious. Both are disappointed.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“If you want to know what a woman really means—which, by the way, is always a dangerous thing to do—look at her, don’t listen to her.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“There is nothing like youth. The middle-aged are mortgaged to Life. The old are in life’s lumber-room. But youth is the Lord of Life. Youth has a kingdom waiting for it.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance
“Discontent is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation.” – Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance