“In traditional forms of power, like that of the sovereign, power itself is made visible, brought out in the open, put constantly on display. The multitudes are kept in the shadows, appearing only at the edges of power’s brilliant glow. Disciplinary power reverses these relations. Now, it is power itself which seeks invisibility and the objects of power—those on whom it operates—are made the most visible. It is this fact of surveillance, constant visibility, which is the key to disciplinary technology.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“In disciplinary technology, the internal organization of space depends on the principle of elementary partitioning into regular units. This space is based on a principle of presences and absences. In such a simple coding, each slot in the grid is assigned a value. These slots facilitate the application of discipline to the body. . . . Individuals are placed, transformed, and observed with an impressive economy of means. For the most efficient and productive operation, it is necessary to define beforehand the nature of the elements to be used; to find individuals who fit the definition proposed; to place them in the ordered space; to parallel the distribution of functions in the structure of space in which they will operate. Consequently, all of space within a confined area must be ordered; there should be no waste, no gaps, no free margins; nothing should escape.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“Discipline proceeds by the organization of individuals in space, and it therefore requires a specific enclosure of space. In the hospital, the school, or the military field, we find a reliance on an orderly grid. Once established, this grid permits the due distribution of the individuals to be disciplined and supervised; this procedure facilitates the reduction of dangerous multitudes or wandering vagabonds to fixed and docile individuals.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“Discipline is a technique, not an institution. It functions in such a way that it could be massively, almost totally appropriated in certain institutions (houses of detention, armies) or used for precise ends in others (schools, hospitals); it could be employed by preexisting authorities (disease control) or by parts of the judicial state apparatus (police). But it is not reducible or identifiable with any of these particular instances. Discipline does not simply replace other forms of power which existed in society. Rather, it ‘invests’ or colonizes them, linking them together, extending their hold, honing their efficiency.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“From the idea that the state has its own nature and its own finality, to the idea that man is the true object of the state’s power, as far as he produces a surplus strength, as far as he is a living, working, speaking being, as far as he constitutes a society, and as far as he belongs to a population in an environment, we can see the increasing intervention of the state in the life of the individual. The importance of life for these problems of political power increases; a kind of animalization of man through the most sophisticated political techniques results. Both the development of the possibilities of the human and social sciences, and the simultaneous possibility of protecting life and of the holocaust make their historical appearance.” – Michel Foucault, Stanford Lectures
“The eighteenth-century humanist discourse of equality fired political movements of an unprecedented scale. But at the same time, in a quieter way, tighter discipline in manufacturing workshops, regimented corvées of vagabonds, and increased police surveillance of every member of the society assured the growth of a set of relations which were not and could not be ones of equality, fraternity, and liberty.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, 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)
“Power is domination. All it can do is forbid, and all it can command is obedience. Power, ultimately, is repression; repression, ultimately, is the imposition of the law; the law, ultimately, demands submission.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“History is not the progress of universal reason. It is the play of rituals of power, humanity advancing from one domination to another.” – Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics
“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