Governing free subjects: flesh, resistance and obedience

Abstract

The present article discusses Michel Foucault’s analyses of power, resistance and subjectivity developed in the second half of the 1970s. For this purpose, we will take into account the different forms in which his work is presented (lectures, essays, articles, books etc.) and a set of archival documents (unpublished manuscripts) from the Fonds Foucault, recently acquired by the Bibliothèque nationale de France. On the one hand, the article will explore the ethical and political attitude leading Foucault to develop new and complex analysis of power, mainly through his relation to the question of freedom and through his use of the concepts of “governmentality” and “critique”. On the other hand, it will explore unpublished manuscripts on the question of the “spiritual direction” and the “government of souls” in the age of Reforms. These texts demonstrate Foucault's progressive interest, in the mid-1970s, in the political and moral history of Christianity. At the heart of complex genealogies that go back to Christian modern theology, he found a new way of thinking the relation to the self as a possibility of both conflict and freedom.

Keywords

• confession
• freedom
• governmentality
• manuscripts
• resistance