Technologiesoftheselfseminarwithfoucault

technologies of the self

Plato's Alcibiades in which you find the first elaboration of the notion of epimeleia heautou, 'care of oneself

the role of reading and writing in constituting the self

public lecture to the university community on "The Political Technology of Individuals."

FROM insanity, deviancy, criminality, and sexuality TO technologies of power and domination THROUGH what he termed "dividing practices" (Madness and Civilization, 1961, trans. 1965; The Birth of the Clinic, 1963, trans. 1973; and Discipline and Punish, 1975, trans. 1977).2 =>>how a human being turns him- or herself into a subject

Vermont seminar, he began an investigation of those practices whereby individuals, by their own means or with the help of others, acted on their own bodies, souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being in order to transform themselves and attain a certain state of perfection or happiness, or to become a sage or immortal, and so on (p.information practises here?)

final lecture to the University of Vermont community, Foucault summarized his concern with the self as an alternative to the traditional philosophical questions: What is the world? What is man? What is truth?

end of the eighteenth century with Kant: "What are we in our actuality?" "What are we today?"-that is, "the field of the historical reflection on ourselves."

Foucault located the roots of the modern concept of the self in first- and second-century Grcco­ Roman philosophy and in fourth- and fifth-century Christianspirituality, two different contexts that he understood to be in historical continuity.

techniques of self-formation from· the early Greeks to the Christian age

history of the present

My field is the history of thought. Man is a thinking being What I am afraid of about humanism is that it presents a certain form of our ethics as a universal model for any kind of freedom. I think that there arc more secrets, more possible freedoms, and more inventions in our future than we can imagine in humanism as it is dogmatically represented on every side of the political rainbow

Unlike other interdictions, sexual interdictions are constantly connected with the obligation to tell the truth about onesel.confession, sexuality is related in a strange and complex way both to verbal prohibition and to the obligation to tell the truth, of hiding what one does.

How had the subject been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden -question of the relation between asceticism and truth.

How have certain kinds of interdictions required the price of certain kinds of knowledge about oneself? \Vhat must one know about oneself in order to be willing to renounce anything? (****)

Christianity has always been more interested in the history of its beliefs than in the history of real practices

As a context, we must understand that there arc four major types of these "technologies," each a matrix of practical reason: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which 1 permit individuals to effect by their own means or with .the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and semis, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. These four types of technologies hardly ever function separately, although each one of them is associated with a certain type of domination. Each implies certain modes of training and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes

hermeneutics of the self in two different contexts which arc historically contiguous: ( 1) Greco-Roman philosophy in the first two centuries A.D. of the 

early Roman Empire and (2) Christian spirituality and the monastic principles