Confession, Obedience, and Subjectivity: Michel Foucault's Unpublished Lectures On the Government of the Living

Delivered at the Collège de France between January and March 1980, the lectures entitled On the Government of the Living (Du gouvernement des vivants) seem to be the missing piece in the Foucauldian puzzle. Still unpublished, those eleven lectures were intended to set the theoretical foundation for the book announced as the fourth and last volume of the History of Sexuality, under the title Confessions of the Flesh (Les aveux de la chair). This book, however, was never published, despite the fact that his editor described it as the keystone for the entire History of Sexuality.1 The value of Michel…