Technologies of the Self: A Seminar With Michel Foucault
by Michel Foucault
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"Technologies of the Self" is a record of the faculty seminar conducted by Michel Foucault in 1982 at the University of Vermont. The volume includes seminar presentations in the fields of history of religions, literature, and ideas.Tags
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Found this fascinating, although I skipped the pieces on Hamlet and Freud. Fascinating firstly from filling in a piece in how Foucault thought - the intro sets out the progress and history of his study over the years and sets his other, main books in context.
Secondly fascinating from the perspective of someone raised on Catholic practice - this book goes into the various techniques for studying and "improving" the self in classical history, and does a great job of giving background, context and understanding to a lot of the practices still in use today - for example, the nature of the spoken word, confession, and the purpose of mercy. Even outside of religious institutions, such "tools" are still widespread, and understanding the show more environment in which they sprung up, and the alternatives around at the time, goes a long way towards Foucault's goal of helping people to see that they are more free than they think they are.
I happened to be reading Wikipedia on gnosticism for a separate reason at the time of reading, but this makes for great resources which dovetail in with what Foucault describes around "knowing" and "saying" - the implicit and the explicit as discovery techniques.
Anyone with an interest in themselves, and the role of religion and other institutions acting on the "self" should definitely have a pick through this. show less
Secondly fascinating from the perspective of someone raised on Catholic practice - this book goes into the various techniques for studying and "improving" the self in classical history, and does a great job of giving background, context and understanding to a lot of the practices still in use today - for example, the nature of the spoken word, confession, and the purpose of mercy. Even outside of religious institutions, such "tools" are still widespread, and understanding the show more environment in which they sprung up, and the alternatives around at the time, goes a long way towards Foucault's goal of helping people to see that they are more free than they think they are.
I happened to be reading Wikipedia on gnosticism for a separate reason at the time of reading, but this makes for great resources which dovetail in with what Foucault describes around "knowing" and "saying" - the implicit and the explicit as discovery techniques.
Anyone with an interest in themselves, and the role of religion and other institutions acting on the "self" should definitely have a pick through this. show less
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Michel Foucault was born on October 15, 1926, in Poitiers, France, and was educated at the Sorbonne, in Paris. He taught at colleges all across Europe, including the Universities of Lill, Uppsala, Hamburg, and Warsaw, before returning to France. There he taught at the University of Paris and the College of France, where he served as the chairman show more of History of Systems of Thought until his death. Regarded as one of the great French thinkers of the twentieth century, Foucault's interest was in the human sciences, areas such as psychiatry, language, literature, and intellectual history. He made significant contributions not just to the fields themselves, but to the way these areas are studied, and is particularly known for his work on the development of twentieth-century attitudes toward knowledge, sexuality, illness, and madness. Foucault's initial study of these subjects used an archaeological method, which involved sifting through seemingly unrelated scholarly minutia of a certain time period in order to reconstruct, analyze, and classify the age according to the types of knowledge that were possible during that time. This approach was used in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, for which Foucault received a medal from France's Center of Scientific Research in 1961, The Birth of the Clinic, The Order of Things, and The Archaeology of Knowledge. Foucault also wrote Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, a study of the ways that society's views of crime and punishment have developed, and The History of Sexuality, which was intended to be a six-volume series. Before he could begin the final two volumes, however, Foucault died of a neurological disorder in 1984. (Bowker Author Biography) An outstanding philosopher and intellectual figure on the contemporary scene, Foucault has been influential in both philosophy and the recent interpretation of literature. Trained in philosophy and psychology, he was named to a chair at the College de France in 1970. He also taught in various departments of French literature as a visiting professor in the United States. Until 1968 he was a major figure in the critical movement known as structuralism, a method of intellectual inquiry based on the idea that all human behavior and achievement arises from an innate ability to organize, or "structure," human experiences. In both The Order of Things (1966) and The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) he was interested in the organization of human knowledge and in the transformations of intellectual categories. His influential history of the prison, Discipline and Punish (1975), contributed to the study of the relationship of power and various forms of knowledge, as did the several volumes of an unfinished History of Sexuality published just before his death. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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