Abstract
This chapter begins with Foucault’s interpretation of power as governmentality and its inheritance from pastoral-power of a technology of political rationality, which links the exercise of somato- to bio-power and produces subjection. This leads Foucault to the notion of critical history and his demarcation of ethics-oriented from code-oriented moralities. In the former, subjectivity is constituted through a practical relation to the self, whereas in code-oriented moralities it is produced via a mediated hermeneutics of the self. In The Use of Pleasure, ethico-political practices of the self demand an agonistic relation to oneself, whereas in The Care of the Self ethico-social practices of the self require a reciprocal ethos. Together, they offer a model for maturity in the face of games of truth in the present.
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Dalgliesh, B. (2017). Critical History and Ethics. In: Critique as Critical History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61009-2_6
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