Where does that impulse that lead us to seek the truth within ourselves come from, to know us and to verbalize that knowledge before others? This practice of decipherment, of diving into one’s own thoughts and feelings to subject them to an unlimited interpretation, which Foucault calls “hermeneutics of itself”, is the axis of the two conferences and the two interventions gathered in this book, which took place in the United States in 1980 and have been recently published in France.
They mark a decisive moment in the project of tracing a genealogy of the subject. Foucault shows how the so-mentioned modern subject was historically constituted and how it is not enough to take into account the techniques of domination or coercion (in hospitals, asylums, prisons), but it is necessary to also incorporate the “techniques of self”, the ways in which the subject acts on himself, on his own body, his “soul” and his behaviors. In oral expositions that exhibit an argument as rigorous as it is clear and fluid, it traces in the texts of Greco-Roman Antiquity and early Christianity the techniques that link the subject to his truth. It describes how self-examination, direction of conscience, and confession work. And it warns an opposition, a radical discontinuity, between the socratic tradition of “know yourself,” that did not seek to extract a truth hidden from the bottom of the subject, but to help it recognize how it could act better, and the Christian precept “confesses to your spiritual guidance each of your thoughts,” which urges the most profound secrets and constant obedience and self-mortification for the faults committed. It is here, in this discontinuity marked by the Christian confession, that Foucault places the origin of that hermeneutics of itself that the judicial, medical, psychoanalytic and psychiatric institutions will then cross, and that it is proposed to us even today.
These lectures not only serve as a path of access to Foucault’s last courses and books, but as a fundamental piece in his ethical-political project of detaching a hermeneutic of himself that can close the way to the possibility of living in another way, to go beyond the limits that seems to impose our historical heritage on us.