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“Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural fact, like weather (but, then again, weather is no longer a natural fact so much as a political-economic effect). In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS. In his book The Selfish Capitalist, Oliver James has convincingly posited a correlation between rising rates of mental distress and the neoliberal mode of capitalism practiced in countries like Britain, the USA and Australia. In line with James’s claims, I want to argue that it is necessary to reframe the growing problem of stress (and distress) in capitalist societies. Instead of treating it as incumbent on individuals to resolve their own psychological distress, instead, that is, of accepting the vast privatization of stress that has taken place over the last thirty years, we need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so many people, and especially so many young people, are ill?”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.' That’s the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.”
― John R. Searle

“Aren't you sure of what you're saying? Are you going to change yet again, shift your position according to the questions that are put to you, and say that the objections are not really directed at the place from which you are speaking? Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out that will enable you in your next book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you're now doing: no, no, I'm not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you?'

'What, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in writing, do you think that I would keep so persistently to my task, if I were not preparing â€� with a rather shaky hand â€� a labyrinth into which I can venture, into which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I will never have to meet again. I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write.”
― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

“Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ”
― Foucault Michel

“Curiosity evokes ‘concernâ€�; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential. I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent ‘badâ€� information from invading and suffocating the ‘good.â€� Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.”
― Michel Foucault

“We demand that sex speak the truth [...] and we demand that it tell us our truth, or rather, the deeply buried truth of that truth about ourselves wich we think we possess in our immediate consciousness.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaediaâ€� in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like fliesâ€�. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences

“I never could read Foucault. I find philosophy tedious. All of my knowledge comes from reading novels and some history. I read Being and Nothingness and realized that I remembered absolutely nothing when I finished it. I used to go to the library every day and read every day for eight hours. I’d dropped out of high school and had to teach myself. I read Sartre without any background. I just forced myself and I learned nothing.”
― Michael Gira

“[…] marginile unei cărÅ£i nu sunt niciodată clar ÅŸi riguros trasate: dincolo de titlu, de primele rânduri ÅŸi de punctul final, mai presus de configuraÅ£ia sa internă ÅŸi de forma care îi conferă autonomie, ea se află prinsă într-un sistem de trimiteri la alte cărÅ£i, la alte texte, la alte fraze: este un nod într-o reÅ£ea.”
― Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language

“I had been mad enough to study reason; I was reasonable enough to study madness.”
― Michel Foucault

“Der Mensch, von dem man uns spricht und zu dessen Befreiung man uns einlädt, ist bereits in sich das Resultat einer Unterwerfung, die viel tiefer ist als er.”
― Foucault, Michel

“Enfermé dans le navire, d’où on n’échappe pas, le fou est confié à la rivière aux mille bras, à la mer aux mille chemins, à cette grande incertitude extérieure à tout. Il est prisonnier au milieu de la plus libre, de la plus ouverte des routes : solidement enchaîné à l’infini carrefour. Il est le Passager par excellence, c’est-à-dire le prisonnier du Passage.”
― Michel Foucault, Å’uvres, tome I

“Humanism is something entirely different. It is a theme or rather a set of
themes that have reappeared on several occasions over time in European
societies; these themes always tied to value judgments have obviously varied
greatly in their content as well as in the values they have preserved.
Furthermore they have served as a critical principle of differentiation. In the
seventeenth century there was a humanism that presented itself as a critique of
Christianity or of religion in general; there was a Christian humanism opposed
to an ascetic and much more theocentric humanism. In the nineteenth century
there was a suspicious humanism hostile and critical toward science and
another that to the contrary placed its hope in that same science. Marxism has
been a humanism; so have existentialism and personalism; there was a time
when people supported the humanistic values represented by National
Socialism and when the Stalinists themselves said they were humanists.
From this we must not conclude that everything that has ever been linked with
humanism is to be rejected but that the humanistic thematic is in itself too
supple too diverse too inconsistent to serve as an axis for reflection. And it is a
fact that at least since the seventeenth century what is called humanism has
always been obliged to lean on certain conceptions of man borrowed from
religion science or politics. Humanism serves to color and to justify the
conceptions of man to which it is after all obliged to take recourse.”
― Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader

“Our bodies are rich sources of evidence about sexual selection pressures because they are visible, measurable, easily comparable with those of other species, and relatively undistorted by human culture. In recent years much nonsense has been written by post-modern theorists such as Michel Foucault about the "social construction of the body", as if human bodies were the incarnation of cultural norms rather than ancestral sexual preferences.”
― Geoffrey Miller, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature

“What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction

“architecture interferes with people’s lives, the way people use and occupy space, as well as with the individual sense of the aesthetico-ethical categories such as beauty and propriety.”
― Gordana Fontana-Giusti

“...confession is believed to reveal the deep truths of who people are (...) Michel Foucault once wrote that we live in a "confessional society." (...) But confessions were not originally about fact-finding, nor were they meant to entertain. Confession began as a search for absolution.”
― Rich Villodas, The Deeply Formed Life: Five Transformative Values to Root Us in the Way of Jesus

“One problem with taking on a physical or mental disability as an identity is that it disincentivizes any possible mitigation of the disability.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Consequently, we now have Social Justice texts -forming a kind of Gospel of Social Justice- that express, with absolute certainty, that all white people are racist, all men are sexist, racism and sexism are systems that can exist and oppress absent even a single person with racist of sexist intentions or beliefs (in the usual sense of the terms). sex is not biological and exists on a spectrum, language can be literal violence, denial of gender identity is killing people, the wish to remedy disability and obesity is hateful, and everything needs to be decolonized.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Mental health activism also frequently regards mental illness as a marginalized identity. One problem with this approach is that people tend to get attached to their identities and this may discourage some from seeking treatment and trying to recover.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“The ideas of Social Justice scholarship often look good on paper. That's almost always the way with bad theories.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Communism is a great example of the human tendency to fail to appreciate how our best theories can fail catastrophically in practice, l even if their adherents are motivated by an idealistic vision of "the greater good".”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Social Justice cannot succeed because it does not correspond with reality or with core human intuitions of fairness and reciprocity and because it is an idealistic metanarrative.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“Religions and many theoretical constructions are metanarratives, but liberalism and science are not.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“People in liberal systems are free to believe anything they wish, and they're free to argue for anything they want, but to claim that such beliefs are knowledge and demand they be respected as such is another matter.”
― Helen Pluckrose, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody

“[...] white supremacy and coloniality still form the glue for the institutional and intellectual disciplinarity of western critical thought. Since the ideas of the Black Panther Party are limited to concerns with ethnic racism elsewhere, they do not register as thought qua thought, and can thus be exploited by and elevated to universality only in the hands of European thinkers such as Foucault, albeit without receiving any credit. [Dear reader, if this reminds you of the colonial expropriation of natural resources, you would be neither wrong nor alone in making such an assumption. In the words of Kanye West: that shit cray.]”
― Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

“Foucault’s description of an eighteenth-century soldier is also an accurate portrait of the typical citizen of District 13. The District 13 citizen is 'something that can be made; out of a formless clay, an inapt body, the machine required can be constructed; posture is gradually corrected; a calculated constraint runs slowly through each part of the body, mastering it, making it pliable, ready at all times, turning silently into the automatism of habit.' If you enact this process on the scale of a whole society, you get a populace that literally embodies obedience.”
― Christina Van Dyke

“As sociedades de controle descritas pelo próprio Kafka mas também por Foucault e Burroughs, operam por meio da "postergação indefinida": a educação é um processo para toda a vida; o treinamento para o trabalho se estende por toda a vida profissional; o trabalho nunca termina porque você leva o trabalho para a casa; trabalha-se em casa e se fica em casa no trabalho etc. Uma consequência deste modo "indefinido" de poder e que a vigilância externa é sucedida pelo policiamento interno. O controle só funciona se você for cúmplice. Logo, a figura do "viciado em controle" de Burroughs: aquele que é viciado por controle, mas também, inevitavelmente, aquele que foi dominado e possuído pelo controle.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“The map of the Critical Social Justice world is not composed of the coordinate systems of latitude and longitude, but the invisible power structures derived from a Foucaldian understanding of human relations.”
― Andrew Doyle, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

“Historical ontology is about the ways in which the possibilities for choice, and for being, arise in history. It is not to be practiced in terms of grand abstractions, but in terms of the explicit formations in which we can constitute ourselves, formations whose trajectories can be plotted as dearly as those of trauma or child development, or, at one remove, that can be traced more obscurely by larger organizing concepts such as objectivity or even facts themselves. Historical ontology is not so much about the formation of character as about the space of possibilities for character formation that surround a person, and create the potentials for "individual experience".”
― Ian Hacking, Historical Ontology