"A great prison structure was planned, whose different levels would correspond exactly to the levels of the centralized administration. The scaffold, where the body of the tortured criminal had been exposed to the ritually manifested force of the sovereign, the punitive theatre in which the representation of punishment was permanently available to the social body, was replaced by a great enclosed, complex and hierarchized structure that was integrated into the very body of the state apparatus."

“Il me semble que la tache politique actuelle dans une société comme la notre c’est de critiquer le jeu des institutions apparemment les plus neutres et les plus indépendantes, de les critiquer et les attaquer de telle manière que la violence politique qui s’exerçait obscurément en elles (les institutions) surgissent et qu’on puisse lutter contre elles.”

“Je crois que le pouvoir politique s’exerce encore, s’exerce en outre, de plus, par l’intermédiaire d’un certain nombre d’institutions qui ont l’air comme ça de n’avoir rien de commun avec le pouvoir politique, qui ont l’air d’en être indépendantes et qui ne le sont pas.”

“What all these people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body — through the eroticization of the body. I think it's ... a creative enterprise, which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure.”

“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than "politicians" think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”

“One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. (When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production.) The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.”

“Qui définit le moment où j'écris?”