Michel Foucault and the Genealogy of Modern Subject: Government, Freedom and the Truth of the Self

Abstract

This article intends to trace the genealogy of modern subjectivity offered by Michel Foucault along his work, linking the critic of the subject as sovereign conscience –developed during the ‘60s- with the reflexion on the subject of the liberal governmentality carried on in Security, territory, population and The birth of biopolitics, and the analysis of the veridiction of the self undertaken in the last seminars delivered at the Collège de France. In this sense, it is possible to observe a certain continuity in the approach to the problem of modern subjectivity, as we can see in the attempt to dismantle the image of the subject’s sovereignty done in The order of the things and Archaeology of knowledge showing the effectual condition of the subject as an individual capable of finding the truth of its self, its desire, its interest, a crucial question in the governmental strategy of liberalism. That type of subject is forged, along the Western history, through a series of technologies that will enable a subjective structure defined as inwardness, as the folding of the self, as self-contemplation. The modern subject thus forged, as far as he is at the core of the liberal governmental rationality, is at the same time modelled by the critical ethos that prompts him to problematize what he is, what he does and the world where he lives, allowing him to think, to act and to reconstitute himself differently.