Power over the Body, Power over the Mind. Michel Foucault and the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom
Power over the Body, Power over the Mind. Michel Foucault and the Care of the Self as a Practice of Freedom

Summary/Abstract: The theme of the care of the self and the techniques of the self, occupied much of the last Foucault’s thought, representing an apparently new philosophical approach. In the interview Foucault realized in 1984 and directly quoted in the title of this article, the French philosopher was invited to illustrate, in a more detailed manner, some of the key aspects of what indeed was considered a substantial change in his researching interests. In fact this issue was connected, at least initially, to a more generic attempt to articulate the question of how a subject could be the initial and final point of resistance to the political and institutional power, a role in which it appeared mostly as a passive product of the power and the domain of technical devices. It seems quite surprising that Foucault accomplished to write a history of the philosophical construction of subjectivity in terms of practical self-constitution and self-invention and even imagined reconsidering the totality of its constitution in such terms.

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