Michel Foucault Quotes


Confined on the ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him.


Citations

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated by Richard Howard, Pantheon Books, 1965, p. 11.

Related Quotes

Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault
  • Born: October 15, 1926
  • Died: June 25, 1984
  • Nationality: French
  • Profession: Historian

Paul-Michel Foucault was a French philosopher, historian of ideas, writer, political activist, and literary critic.