Course Summary

Abstract

¹UNDER THE GENERAL TITLE of “Subjectivity and Truth,” it is a matter of beginning an inquiry regarding instituted modes of self-knowledge and their history: how was the subject established, at different times and in different institutional contexts, as a possible, desirable, or even indispensable object of knowledge? How were the experiences that one may have of oneself and the knowledge that one forms from it organized through certain schemas? How were these schemas defined, valorized, recommended, imposed? It is clear that neither appeal to an original experience nor the study of philosophical theories of the soul, the passions, and the body can serve as the main axis in such an investigation. The most useful line to follow for this inquiry seems to be what could be called “techniques of self,” that is to say the procedures, such as no doubt exist in all civilizations, that are recommended or prescribed to individuals for fixing, maintaining, or transforming their identity in terms of certain aims and thanks to relations of self-mastery or self-knowledge. In short, it is a matter of placing the imperative of “know oneself,” which seems to us to be so characteristic of our civilization, in the broader questioning that serves as its more or less explicit context: What is one to do with oneself? What work is to be carried out on oneself? How is one to “govern oneself” by exercising actions [in which] one is oneself the objective, the domain in which they are applied, the instrument they make use of, and the subject that acts?

Published in the Annuaire du Collège de France, 80^e année, Histoire des systèmes de pensée, année 1980–1981, 1981, pp. 385–389, and in DE 4, pp. 213–218; “Quarto,” vol. 2, pp. 1032–1037. An earlier version of this summary by Robert Hurley appears with the title “Subjectivity and Truth” in M. Foucault, EW, 1, pp. 299–304.