Technologies of the Self Quotes

“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 a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end.”
― Michel Foucault, Tecnologías del yo y otros textos afines

“I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am.”
― Michel Foucault, Tecnologías del yo y otros textos afines

“What I have studied are the three traditional problems: (1) What are the relations we have to truth through scientific knowledge, to those "truth games" which arc so important in civilization and in which we are both subject and object? (2) What are the relationships we have to others through those strange strategies and power relationships? And (3) what are the relationships between truth, power, and self?”
― Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault

“All my analyses are against the idea of universal necessities in human existence. They show the arbitrariness of institutions and show which space of freedom we can still enjoy and how many changes can still be made.”
― Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault

“My role-and that is too emphatic a word-is to show people that they arc much freer than they feel, that people accept as truth, as evidence, some themes which have been built up at a certain moment during history, and that this so-called evidence can be criticized and destroyed. To change something in the minds of people-that's the role of an intellectual.”
― Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault