Statement 22

Michel Foucault once wrote: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.” For Foucault, refusal does not mean negation; it means rather that attempts to constitute individuals as objects of their own knowledge is both theoretically dubious and socially perilous, and this applies just as much in the development of a critique of others as it does for oneself.

Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Edited by H. Dreyfus & P. Rabinow, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1982) p. 216.