Du gouvernement des vivants is a pivotal lecture. Delivered at the Collège de France in the first quarter of 1980, Michel Foucault continues the history of "regimes of truth" that runs through all his lectures at the Collège de France, with a major inflection point: begun in the field of law and the judiciary, the exploration continued in the field of politics - thematic relations between power and knowledge, then governmentality. Here, it moves into the field of practices and techniques of the self, a domain of ethics that Michel Foucault would never leave.
"How is it that in Western Christian culture, the government of men demands of those who are governed, in addition to acts of obedience and submission, "acts of truth" which have this particularity that not only is the subject required to tell the truth, but to tell the truth about himself, his faults, his desires, the state of his soul?", asks Michel Foucault. This question leads him from a re-reading of Sophocles'Oedipus the King to an analysis of the "acts of truth" specific to primitive Christianity, through the practices of baptism, penance and direction of conscience. Michel Foucault focuses on the acts by which believers are led to manifest the truth of who they are as indefinitely fallible beings. From the public expression of his sinful condition, in the ritual of penance, to the meticulous verbalization of his most intimate thoughts, in the examination of conscience, we see the organization of a pastoral economy centered on confession.
Du gouvernement des vivants is the first of Michel Foucault's unpublished investigations into the field of ethics, both in his lectures at the Collège de France and in the final volumes ofHistoire de la sexualité.
This summary is published with the kind permission of Editions du Seuil. It is taken from the back cover of Du Gouvernement des vivants. Cours au Collège de France (1979-1980) by Michel Foucault, published on November 8, 2012.
The sound recordings of Michel Foucault 's lectures were made by his public, notably by Mr. Gilbert Burlet, and given at the Collège de France.