FOUCAULT: Eh bien! Power, yes, I have spoken to great extent about the ways societies use discourse to empower and disempower people (816). It's all about power, and power is discourse.
BAKHTIN: It's all about dialogue. Any true understanding is dialogic in nature. ... Understanding strives to match the speaker's word with a counter word (688). You see, the word is the ideological phenomenon par excellence because the entire reality of the word is wholly absorbed in its function of being a sign (684). There are other signs such as music, ritual, gesture, and pictures, but a word, is the purest and most sensitive medium of social intercourse (684).
RAMUS: Mes chers gentilhommes! Allow me to interject. I am sure you will listen to me with a willing and impartial mind so that I may convince you with unwavering reason to the extent that truth itself--which cannot be refuted or disproved-will hold firm (452).
ARISTOTLE: Speak, youth, for naturally better persons or things have the nobler excellences and works, as those of a man are nobler than those of a woman ... (157).
FOUCAULT: Absolute truth? Do you realize it is just that kind of thinking that, well ... This will to truth is one of three types of prohibition on which I expound in my Discourse on Language. As I've said before, It is perhaps a little risky to speak of the opposition between true and false as a third system of exclusion ... but this will to truth, like the other systems of exclusion, relies on institutional support (840-41).
CIXOUS: Merde!!! C'est vrai! Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason. ... It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism (883). Talk about exclusion! I'm speaking of woman in her inevitable struggle against conventional man; and of a universal woman subject who must bring women to their senses and to their meaning in history (880). The little girls ... Frigidified. But are they ever seething underneath! What an effort it takes--there's no end to it--for the sex cops to bar their threatening return ... (881).
