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Résumé :
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The first of a multivolume series translated into English, this is an engaging and accessible introduction to Foucault, who was an enormously influential but notoriously difficult contemporary French philosopher. Rather than detailed studies, it offers mostly overviews--sketches of problems to be addressed--in the form of proposals for the courses Foucault taught at the College de France, as well as interviews and essays (including some reworked prefaces) from the late 1970s to his death in 1984. Among the latter, Foucault explores, from antiquity to the present, issues relating to ethics and the problem of a free relation to the self and sets the terms for a project called "the care of the self." Foucault opposes the popular notion of a hidden but authentic self (or desire), which could be liberated; for Foucault, there is no such authentic self. But there can be ethical relationships to the self, and he envisions "new modes of relating to the self," which can then also be seen in a larger project of undoing "the impoverishment of the relational fabric" of society as a whole.
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