Foucault, M. Subjectivity and Truth In: PUBLIC sacred technologies (1993) 9- 20

• truth-therapies (i.e. that the mad could be cured if they could be shown that their delirium is w/out any relation to reality) p10

vs

• Lauret’s desire to have patients “declare aloud and intelligibly the truth about oneself” p10
• this is a confession - redemption of sins or condemnation of the guilty (Western)
• Foucault reflects on why “for one’s own salvation one needs to know as exactly as possible who one is and also, which is something rather different, that one needs to tell its explicitly as possible to others” p10
• explore relationship between individuality, discourse, truth (and coercion)

3 phases of studying the genealogy of the modern subject:
1- as living, speaking, working being
2- subjects of institutions (prison, hospital, etc) - objects of knowledge and domination
3- how the subject creates him/herself - modern experience of sexuality

Habermas suggests 3 types of techniques in human societies: p11
1- PRODUCTION: techniques to produce, transform, manipulate
2- SIGNIFICATION: techniques to use sign systems
3- DOMINATION: techniques which permit one to determine the conduct of individuals, impose, submit
4- Foucault adds TECHNOLOGY OF THE SELF - affecting transformations by their own means, to attain certain state of perfection(?)

3 and 4 are used to to analyse the genealogy of the subject in Western civilization
- includes structures of coercion and domination
- inds. are driven by others is tied to the way the conduct themselves - GOVERNMENT
- government as “versatile equilibrium” (ref to Gramsci’s hegemony?)
- discipline - Foucault admits to over-emphasising the techs. of domination in previous work
- power is more than violence or coercion
- power is complex relations
- suggests getting rid of Freudian ideas around “interiorization of the law by the self” p11
- links government - sexuality - tech. of self

Techniques of the Self
• discovery and formulation of the truth concerning oneself
• Delphic precept “gnothi seauton” - know yourself
• concepts of confession and self-examination from paganism to the beginning of Christian Era - knowing yourself became a monastic precept: “confess, to your spiritual guide, each of your thoughts” p12

• the goal of Greek philosophy - transformation of the individual - master/disciple relationship p13
• not a lot of importance in antique conscience - master tie was provisional (rather than obedience)
• temporary need for advice to specific end
• formulating truths about oneself - discovering truth or “recalling truth forgotten by the subject” p15
• forgetting rules of conduct: “the subject constitutes the point of intersection between a set of memories which must be brought into the present and acts which have to be regulated” p15

Truth Consequences
Greek
• not defined by a correspondence to reality, but as a force which is inherent to principles and which has to be developed in a discourse
• truth is not something hidden or behind consciousness - it is rather before the individual as a point of attraction/magnetic force
• Greek gnome - will and knowledge - in the soul of people - force of the truth one with force of the will
• emergence of the self
• unlike in Christian tech. of self, the self is not something that has to be discovered or deciphered as a very obscure text, self not to be discovered, but to be constituted through the force of truth p17

For part 2 Christianity and Confession (on Christianity, see Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993)
Texts edited by Thomas Keenan abd Mark Blasius