Foucault's Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life » (1)

In his renowned courses at the College de France from 1982 to 1984, Michel Foucault devoted his lectures to meticulous readings and interpretations of the works of Plato, Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, among others. His aim, Edward F. McGushin contends, was not to develop a new knowledge of the history of philosophy but to let himself be transformed by the very activity of thinking. McGushin's book shows Foucault, in the last phase of his life, in the act of becoming a philosopher and how his encounter with ancient philosophy allowed him to experience the practice of philosophy as, to paraphrase Nietzsche, a way of becoming who one is: the work of self-formation that the Greeks called askesis.

Through a detailed study of Foucault's last courses, McGushin demonstrates that this new way of practicing philosophical askesis evokes Foucault's ethical resistance to modern relations of power and knowledge. To understand Foucault's project, it is necessary to see it within the context of his earlier work: if his earlier projects represented an attempt to bring to light the relations of power and knowledge that narrowed and limited freedom, this last project represents his effort to take back that freedom by redefining it in terms of care of the self. Foucault stressed that modern power functions by producing individual subjects. This book shows how his excavation of ancient philosophical practices gave him the tools to counter this function-with a practice of self-formation, an askesis.

About the Author:
Edward F. McGushin is an assistant professor of philosophy at Saint Anselm College

Acknowledgments     ix
Introduction     xi
Philosophy as Care of the Self
Truth as a Problem     5
The Socratic Moment     43
The Poetics of the Subject     97
The Cynic and the True Life     148
Care of the Self and Parrhesia in the Age of Reason
Foucault's Cartesian Meditations     175
The Prince and the Pastor: Figures of Power, Care, and Parrhesia     195
Rage for Order: The Advent of Biopower     222
Toward a Critique of the Present     242
Conclusion: A New Poetics of Philosophy     282
List of Abbreviations     289
Notes     291
Bibliography     333
Index     341