My hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus. Michel Foucault Read Quote
Penal law was not created by the common people, nor by the peasantry, nor by the proletariat, but entirely by the bourgeoisie as an important tactical weapon in this system of divisions which they wished to introduce. Michel Foucault Read Quote
The problem of Islam as a political force is an essential one for our time and for the years to come, and we cannot approach it with a modicum of intelligence if we start out from a position of hatred. Michel Foucault Read Quote
This non-proletarianised plebs has been racialist when it has been colonialist; it has been nationalist – chauvinist – when it has been armed; and it has been fascist when it has become the police force.These ideological effects on the plebs have been uncontestable and profound. Michel Foucault Read Quote
It is often said that definitions of Islamic government are imprecise. To me, however, they seemed to have a clarity that was completely familiar and also, it must be said, far from reassuring. Michel Foucault Read Quote
Prison is a recruitment center for the army of crime. That is what it achieves. Michel Foucault Read Quote
The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous form, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network. Michel Foucault Read Quote
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline. Michel Foucault Read Quote
Discipline may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a ‘physics’ or ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. Michel Foucault Read Quote
The book is not simply the object that one holds in one’s hands, and it cannot remain within the little parallelpiped that contains it: its unity is variable and relative. As soon as one questions that unity, it loses its self-evidence; it indicates itself, constructs itself, only on the basis of a complex field of discourse. Michel Foucault Read Quote
