Quotes About Control

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; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.

Surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action.

We must not think that by saying yes to sex, one says no to power.

We are entering the age of the infinite examination and of compulsory objectification.

The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection much more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence...the soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze that each individual under its weight will end by [internalising] to the point that they are their own overseer, each individual thus exercising surveillance over, and against themself.

there is no escaping from power, that it is always-already present constituting that very thing which one attempts to counter it with.

And the good ruler is precisely the one who exercises his power as it ought to be exercised, that is, simultaneously exercising his power over himself. And it is the power over oneself that thus regulates one's power over others.

Le supplice ne rétablissait pas la justice, il réactivait le pouvoir.

Under the authority of a language that had been carefully expurgated so that it was no longer directly named, sex was taken charge of, tracked down as it were, by a discourse that aimed to allow it no obscurity, no respite.

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power. Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.

The chronicle of a man, the account of his life, his historiography, written as he lived out his life formed part of the rituals of his power. The disciplinary methods reversed this relation, lowered the threshold of describable individuality and made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.

Government is the right disposition of things.

everything is dangerous, nothing is innocent

For was this transformation of sex into discourse not governed by the endeavor to expel from reality the forms of sexuality that were not amenable to the strict economy of reproduction: to say no to unproductive activities, to banish casual pleasures, to reduce or exclude practices whose object was not procreation?

one exists only when fixed in definite relations of domination ...

How could the disciplines and the power that functions in them appear arbitrary, when they merely operate the mechanisms of justice itself, even with a view to mitigating their intensity?

En una sociedad como la nuestra son bien conocidos los procedimientos de exclusión. El más evidente, y el más familiar también, es lo prohibido.

In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king... we must construct an analytics of power that no longer takes law as a model and a code.

Le droit de punir a été déplacé de la vengeance du souverain à la défense de la société.

Sand???m?zdan çok daha az Yunanl?y?z. Ne tiyatro basamaklar?n?n ne de sahnenin üzerindeyiz; bizzat yönlendirdiÄŸimiz -çünkü onun bir çark?y?z- onun iktidar etkileri taraf?ndan kuÅŸat?lm?? olarak, Panopticon makinesinin içindeyiz.

The processes of objectification originate in the very tactics of power and of the arrangement of its exercise.