A critique does not consist in saying that things aren't good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based... To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.
Interpretation
Critique involves questioning the assumptions behind accepted practices rather than merely rejecting them.
In this quote, Michel Foucault emphasizes that true critique goes beyond just denouncing the current state of affairs. It requires a deeper examination of the underlying assumptions, norms, and unchallenged ideas that shape accepted practices. Criticism, in Foucault's view, should complicate our understanding and make us question the ease with which we accept things as they are.
In practice
In a debate about educational policies, one might use this quote to highlight the importance of questioning underlying assumptions.
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation [...] He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribed in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.
Matthey, a Geneva physician very close to Rousseau's influence, formulates the prospect for all men of reason: 'Do not glory in your state, if you are wise and civilized men; an instant suffices to disturb and annihilate that supposed wisdom of which you are so proud; an unexpected event, a sharp and sudden emotion of the soul will abruptly change the most reasonable and intelligent man into a raving idiot.
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for love relationships is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.
You may have killed God beneath the weight of all that you have said; but don't imagine that, with all that you are saying, you will make a man that will live longer than he.
The work of an intellectual is not to mould the political will of others; it is, through the analyses that he does in his own field, to re-examine evidence and assumptions, to shake up habitual ways of working and thinking, to dissipate conventional familiarities, to re-evaluate rules and institutions and to participate in the formation of a political will (where he has his role as citizen to play).
The Eyes of the Future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time.
You are not an observer, you are a participant.
Let me tell you something my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing. Hope can drive a man insane.
Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.
Have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them, when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?
Celebrity is never more admired than by the negligent.
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