Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982-1983, edited by Arnold I. Davidson, translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), ISBN: 978-1403986665 (original) (raw)

With the translation of this 1983 lecture course, the first of two-parts, with the translation of a second, The Courage of Truth, expected in 2011, also devoted to the government of self and others, given in 1984, and concluded just before Foucault's death, we are now in a better position to grasp the significance of its author's ‚journey to Greece.‛ We do not read Foucault's focus on Greco-Roman antiquity after 1980 as a retreat from a concern with the problems of modernity. Indeed, it seems to us that Foucault's interpretation of ancient texts, Euripides's Ion, Thucydides's account of Pericles's call to arms against Sparta before the Athenian assembly, the figure of Socrates in Platonic dialogues such as the Apology, and the Gorgias, Plato's letters recounting his involvement in the politics of Syracuse, or the account of the Cynic Diogenes's dialogue with Alexander the Great, Foucault's focus on truth-telling or parresia in the ancient world, are all also directed to the issues confronting both political theory and philosophy in the modern world. Indeed, taking his point of departure in the lecture course from one facet of Kant's philosophy, not ‚the question of the conditions of possibility of true knowledge,‛ Kant's analytic of truth, his epistemology, but rather that other dimension of Kant's thinking, ‚what could be called an ontology of the present, of present reality, an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves,‛ (20-21) Foucault explores the prospects of extricating ourselves from our ‚self-incurred‛ tutelage, our present mode of subjectivity through which we exist under the authority of others.