Foucault Citations
• On the Government of the Living

References for Theme: On the Government of the Living

• Foucault, M
• On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)

  (p.10) Now I know that there are people— their names and nationality are not important— who say: yes, of course, if Bodin does these two things, if he is both theorist of raison d’État t and the great caster out of demon-mania, both demonologist and theorist of the State, this is quite simply because nascent capitalism needed labor and witches were also abortionists, it was a question of removing the checks to demography in order to be able to provide capital with the labor it needed in its factories of the nineteenth century. You can see that the argument is not...

• On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)

  (p.128) A practical consequence of this conception of the preparation for baptism in Tertullian— and here I refer you to chapter 6 of De paenitentia, which, together with De baptismo, is the most important text for understanding all this: “the sinner,” he says, in this time of preparation for baptism, “must lament his sins even before the time of pardon,” for, he says, and this is the text I was just talking about, “the time of repentance ( pénitence ) is that of periculi i and metus , danger and fear. To those who are about to enter the water, I...

• On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)

  (p.143) LAST WEEK I TRIED to explain the passage in Tertullian, from chapter six of De paenitentia , in which he said that we are not immersed in the baptismal waters in order to be purified, but that we are already purified deep in our hearts when we arrive at baptism. I think this passage, which I have tried to clarify by other passages from De paenitentia or from De baptismo , points to a series of important distinctions in Tertullian. The idea that one must arrive at baptism already purified, and so the idea that it is not baptism that,...

• On The Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980 (2014)