The Christian Art of Being Governed

Foucault Studies 20:243-265 (2015)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

Like all previously published volumes of his lectures, the content of The Government of the Living defies brief summary. It shows us Foucault in 1980 mapping out a major new phase in his work in terms that complicate our existing understanding of his unfinished project. My review looks in turn at the two parts of the course: an unusually lengthy discussion of method and heuristics, followed by a tightly focused study of early Christian regimes of truth. I suggest that the complex opening theoretical reflections in these lectures go well beyond mapping the course of the immediately following historical analysis. They need to be seen in coordination with other conceptual innovations introduced over the following years, putting a task that Foucault calls here a “history of the power of truth” on his agenda alongside, and in integral connection with the previously defined tasks of a history of governmentality and a history of the subject. A newly published discussion in Berkeley later in 1980 adds crucial context to these Paris lectures, spelling out the linkage of structures of subjectivation to governability and of penitential ascetics to pastoral power. Taken together, the later books and lectures can now be seen to establish a framework of what I suggest we can call “alethic” or “aletheological” analysis, analysing and mapping across the span of Western history the modes of engagement of life and truth, with a view to enabling a renewed analysis of the political present.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,880

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

From Resistance to Government.Paul Patton - 2013 - In Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary & Jana Sawicki (eds.), A Companion to Foucault. Malden Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 172–188.
About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Lectures at Dartmouth College, 1980.Michel Foucault - 2015 - London: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini, Laura Cremonesi, Arnold I. Davidson, Orazio Irrera & Martina Tazzioli.
Speaking the truth about oneself: lectures at Victoria University, Toronto, 1982.Michel Foucault - 2021 - Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud, Daniele Lorenzini & Daniel Louis Wyche.
Truth.Don Deere - 2014 - In Leonard Lawlor & John Nale (eds.), The Cambridge Foucault Lexicon. New York City: Cambridge University Press. pp. 517-527.
From Biopower to Governmentality.Johanna Oksala - 2013 - In Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary & Jana Sawicki (eds.), A Companion to Foucault. Malden Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 320–336.
“Society Must Be Defended” and the Last Foucault.Julian Bourg - 2004 - Radical Philosophy Review 7 (1):1-16.

Analytics

Added to PP
2017-04-14

Downloads
20 (#1,055,588)

6 months
15 (#221,138)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

How Foucault Got Rid of (Bossy) Marxism.Gordon Hull - 2022 - Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society 34 (3):372-403.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references