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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 October 2015
It has been widely claimed that Foucault's 1980 lecture course at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living (GL), constituted an important turning point in his thinking. That course would begin a series of lecture courses at the Collège that would end in March 1984, just before his death, all devoted to core issues arising in Hellenistic philosophy and Christian theology. While Christian practices of penance and confession are a focus of GL, as Mark Jordan has claimed, throughout what has been termed his “Greco-Roman” trip Foucault always emphasized “the historical importance of pastoral power for modern subjectivity.” There is, then, a definite link between what is often described as the “final Foucault,” with his interest in Patristic Christianity and its own governmental practices, on one hand, and, on the other, the broader question of “government,” both of the self and of others, as well as the historical modes of subject formation, all concerns that characterized the whole of Foucault's oeuvre. Indeed, as Foucault says in his conclusion to GL, the obligation “to tell the truth about oneself” has shaped not just Christianity, but Western modernity too; indeed “the whole social system to which we belong” (312).
1 Mark D. Jordan, Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in Foucault (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 122, our emphasis.
2 Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 13.
3 Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?,” in The Politics of Truth (New York: Semiotext(e), 1997), 105.
4 Ibid., 111.
5 Ibid., 118.
6 Ibid., 132.
7 Jonathan Rée, “Foucault Put to the Question,” Times Literary Supplement, December 3, 2014. Rée was reviewing Foucault's 1981 Louvain lectures, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).
8 Michel Foucault, Fearless Speech, ed. Joseph Pearson (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2001), 74.
9 Foucault's last lecture course at the Collège, 1983–84, published as The Courage of Truth: The Government of the Self and Others II, explored the historico-cultural roots of the possibility of another, a different relationship, of subjectivity to truth.