Michel Foucault

By Michel Focault | Excerpted from Power/Knowledge

It was while I was studying the origins of clinical medicine. I had been planning a study of hospital architecture in the second half of the eighteenth century, when the great movement for the reform of medical institutions was getting under way.

"The word intellectual strikes me as odd. Personally, I've never met any intellectuals. I've met people who write novels, others who treat the sick. People who work in economics and others who write electronic music. I've met people who teach, people who paint, and people of whom I have never really understood what they do... But intellectuals? Never.

On the otherhand, I've met a lot of people who talk about "the intellectual". And listening to them, I've got some idea of what such an animal could be. It's not difficult -- he's quite personified. He's guilty about pretty well everything: about speaking out and about keeping silent, about doing nothing and about getting involved in everything... In short, the intellectual is raw material for a verdict, a sentence, a condemnation, an exlusion...

I don't find that intellectuals talk too much, since for me they don't exist. But I do find that more and more is being said about intellectuals, and I don't find it very reassuring.

I have an unfortunate habit. When people speak about this or that, I try to imagine what the result would be if translated into reality. When they "criticize" someone, when they "denounce" his ideas, when they "condemn" what he writes, I imagine them in the ideal situation in which they would have complete power over him. I take the words they use -- demolish, destroy, reduce to silence, bury -- and see what the effect would be if they were taken literally. And I catch a glimpse of the radiant city in which the intellectual would be in prison, or if he were also a theoretician, hanged, of course."

Source: Michel Foucault:The Masked Philosopher. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and other writings 1977-1984. (page 324)

"All human behavior is scheduled and programmed through rationality. There is a logic of institutions and in behavior and in political relations. In even the most violent ones there is a rationality. What is most dangerous in violence is its rationality. Of course violence itself is terrible. But the deepest root of violence and its permanence come out of the form of the rationality we use. The idea had been that if we live in the world of reason, we can get rid of violence. This is quite wrong. Between violence and rationality there is no incompatibility."

-Michael Foucault

Nick Lewis: Michel, I appreciate you coming back from the dead for the purpose of expanding a few minds that have retained curiosity about their world. That said, this medium has an impatient audience, so I hope you'll forgive me for moving straight to the first question:

The vast majority of people are unaware of who you are and why they should care. You've been dead since 1984; what role can you see yourself possibly playing in our times?

Foucault: My “role” - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people - that's the role of an intellectual.

"I would now like to start looking at that dimension which I have called by that rather nasty word 'governmentality'. Let us suppose that "governing" is not the same thing as 'reigning', that it is not the same thing as 'commanding' or 'making the law'let us suppose that governing is not the same thing as being a sovereign, a suzerain, being lord, being judge, being a general, owner, master, professor. Let us suppose that there is a specificity to what it is to govern and we must now find out a little what type of power is covered by this notion."

- Michel Foucault, Sécurité, Territorie, Population. Cours au Collège de France. 1977-1978, Paris: Gallimard, 2004. p. 119.

"My role - and that is too emphatic a word - is to show people that they are much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed." - Michel Foucault

"There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than politicians think. 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. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas... that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think."

-Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault: Interview with Paul Rabinow (1984):