Quotes of the month (2008)
Quote for March 2008
'When, with Rousseau and Pestallozzi, the eighteenth century concerned itself with constituting for the child, with educational rules that followed his development, a world that would be adapted to him, it made it possible to form around children an unreal, abstract, archaic environment that had no relation to the adult world. The whole development of contemporary education, with its irreproachable aim of preserving the child from adult conflicts, accentuates the distance that separates, for a man, his life as a child and his life as an adult. That is to say, by sparing the child conflicts, it exposes him to a major conflict, to the contradiction between his childhood and his real life. If one adds that, in its educational institutions, a culture does not project its reality directly, with all its conflicts and contradictions, but that it reflects it indirectly through the myths that excuse it, justify it, and idealize it in a chimerical coherence; if one adds that in its education a society dreams of its golden age [...] one understands that fixations and pathological regressions are possible only in a given culture, that they multiply to the extent that social forms do not permit the assimilation of the past into the present content of experience.'
Michel Foucault. [1954] (1987). Mental Illness and Psycbology. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 81.
Quote for February 2008
'Painting has at least this much in common with discourse: when it gives rise to a force which creates history, it is political.'
Michel Foucault. [1975] (2007). The Force of Flight. In Jermy Crampton and Stuart Elden (eds.) Space, Knowledge and Power. Foucault and Geography. Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 169
previous quotes of the month
Quote for January 2008
'A society expresses itself positively in the mental illness displayed by its members, whether it places them at the centre of its religious life, as is often the case amongst the primitive peoples, or whether it seeks to expatriate them by situating them outside social life, as does our culture'.
Michel Foucault. (1966). Maladie Mentale et psychologie. 3rd ed. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, p. 75. (1st edition 1954. This passage trans. Clare O'Farrell).
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