|
Showing 1 - 2 of
2 matches in All Departments
Just before the summer of 1982, French philosopher Michel Foucault
gave a series of lectures at Victoria University in Toronto. In
these lectures, which were part of his project of writing a
genealogy of the modern subject, he is concerned with the care and
cultivation of the self, a theme that becomes central to the
second, third, and fourth volumes of his History of Sexuality.
Throughout his career, Foucault had always been interested in the
question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and
shape subjects, and in the last phase of his life, he became
especially interested not only in how subjects are formed by these
forces, but in how they ethically constitute themselves. In this
lecture series and accompanying seminar, Foucault focuses on
antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman Empire,
and concluding with Christian monasticism in the fourth and fifth
centuries AD. Foucault traces the development of a new kind of
verbal practice-"speaking the truth about oneself"-in which the
subject increasingly comes to be defined by its inner thoughts and
desires. He deemed this new form of "hermeneutical" subjectivity
important not just for historical reasons but also due to its
enduring significance in modern society. Is another form of the
self possible today?
Now in paperback, this collection of Foucault’s lectures traces
the historical formation and contemporary significance of the
hermeneutics of the self. Just before the summer of 1982, French
philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures at Victoria
University in Toronto. In these lectures, which were part of his
project of writing a genealogy of the modern subject, he is
concerned with the care and cultivation of the self, a theme that
becomes central to the second, third, and fourth volumes of his
History of Sexuality. Foucault had always been interested in the
question of how constellations of knowledge and power produce and
shape subjects, and in the last phase of his life, he became
especially interested not only in how subjects are formed by these
forces but in how they ethically constitute themselves. In this
lecture series and accompanying seminar, Foucault focuses on
antiquity, starting with classical Greece, the early Roman empire,
and concluding with Christian monasticism in the fourth and fifth
centuries AD. Foucault traces the development of a new kind of
verbal practice—“speaking the truth about oneself”—in which
the subject increasingly comes to be defined by its inner thoughts
and desires. He deemed this new form of “hermeneutical”
subjectivity important not just for historical reasons, but also
due to its enduring significance in modern society.
|
|