Do Not Ask Who I Am And

In Writing, The Point Is Not To Manifest Or Exalt The Act Of Writing, Nor Is It To Pin A Subject Within Language; It Is, Rather, A Question Of Creating A Space Into Which The Writing Subject Constantly Disappears.

In The Renaissance, Madness Was Present Everywhere And Mingled With Every Experience By Its Images Or Its Dangers. During The Classical Period, Madness Was Shown, But On The Other Side Of Bars; If Present, It Was At A Distance, Under The Eyes Of A Reason That No Longer Felt Any Relation To It And That Would Not Compromise Itself By Too Close A Resemblance. Madness Had Become A Thing To Look At: No Longer A Monster Inside Oneself, But An Animal With Strange Mechanisms, A Bestiality From Which Man Had Long Since Been Suppressed.

We Should Not Be Content To Say That Power Has A Need For Such-and-such A Discovery, Such-and-such A Form Of Knowledge, But We Should Add That The Exercise Of Power Itself Creates And Causes To Emerge New Objects Of Knowledge And Accumulates New Bodies Of Information. ... The Exercise Of Power Perpetually Creates Knowledge And, Conversely, Knowledge Constantly Induces Effects Of Power. ... It Is Not Possible For Power To Be Exercised Without Knowledge, It Is Impossible For Knowledge Not To Engender Power.

Institutions Of Knowledge, Of Foresight And Care, Such As Medicine, Help To Support The Political Power. It's Also Obvious, Even To The Point Of Scandal, In Certain Cases Related To Psychiatry.

To Seek In The Great Accumulation Of The Already-said The Text That Resembles "in Advance" A Later Text, To Ransack History In Order To Rediscover The Play Of Anticipations Or Echoes, To Go Right Back To The First Seeds Or To Go Forward To The Last Traces, To Reveal In A Work Its Fidelity To Tradition Or Its Irreducible Uniqueness, To Raise Or Lower Its Stock Of Originality, To Say That The Port -royal Grammarians Invented Nothing, Or To Discover That Cuvier Had More Predecessors Than One Thought, These Are Harmless Enough Amusements For Historians Who Refuse To Grow Up.