Nielsen, Cynthia R. (2011), Unearthing consonances in Foucault’s accourn of Greco-Roman self-writing and Christian technologies of the self, The Heythrop Journal, pp. 1-15
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2265.2011.00694.x
Opening paragraphs
Although his critics claim otherwise, Michel Foucault understood his work as consistently focused in one way or another on the genealogy of the subject and the construction of subjectivities.1 In other words, while acknowledging changes, developments, retractions, methodological expansions and the like, Foucault also observed strong lines of continuity unifying his corpus – continuity centered upon and constantly hovering around subject-formation.2 Here perhaps I should say a few words regarding my synonymous employment of the terms ‘subject,’‘subjectivity,’ and ‘self.’ Although some scholars might contest my usage, claiming that it conflates distinct concepts, my riposte is that Foucault himself, or at least the English translators of his work, employ the terms synonymously. For example, in his essay, ‘About the Beginnings of the Hermeneutics of the Self,’3 he describes his work on the institutional practices associated with prisons, hospitals, and asylums as directed towards how ‘subjects became objects of knowledge and at the same time objects of domination.’4 He then describes the next phase of his work – the focus of this essay – as an analysis of ‘those forms of understanding which the subject creates about himself.’5 This attention to an active subject who creates, transforms, or reconstitutes himself, Foucault correlates with what he calls, a ‘technology of the self.’6 Rather than analyze the subject primarily from the perspective of social construction or ‘techniques of domination’– as was the case in Discipline and Punish–, he now examines how subjects constitute themselves via techniques allowing them ‘to effect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves.’7 In these passages, as well as others, Foucault uses the terms ‘subject’ and ‘self’ interchangeably, adding qualifiers such as ‘phenomenological’ or ‘transcendental’ to the word ‘subject’ when distinguishing his particular understanding from that of Husserl, Kant, Sartre, or any other philosopher.
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