Critique and the Care of the Self

How can we understand Foucault's work on ancient philosophy,

and its practices of truth-telling and technologies of the self?

While this late phase in Foucault's thought has often been seen as

marking an ethical turn, away from the explicit political stakes of

his earlier works, this book articulates the continuities between his

engagement with antiquity and political events in his own present.



Beginning with a reinterpretation of the question of early and

late style in Foucault's oeuvre, this investigation provides careful

readings of his lectures at the Coll?ge de France, showing how

the care of the self - the style of existence - unfolds as a critical

project. With the notion of the subject developed in Foucault's

late work, the ancient practices of truth-telling can be articulated

with modern economic government, introducing a radically new

understanding of the concept of critique.