The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981--1982 (Michel Foucault Lectures at the Collège de France, 9)

Not his best lecture but ok to look at his research. And yet not deep on the meaning of the human subject but more a recount of the idea of the goal of each individual life from different philosophers of human being. Nice details on Seneca's double standards .

This is a solid read -- one of his better lecture series. I bought a used copy and the quality was poor so the seller refund the cost.

Very good book

an astounding text to labor with and to grow with.

This purchase arrived in a timely manner."Words which are beautiful are seldom true."

Essential for understanding how we learn.

With wit and subtlety, Foucault tells here the story of how Western philosophy became progressively disengaged from life -- and, more importantly, what (and how) philosophy sought to teach us before that fatal split. The result is a long but consistently engaging series of historical meditations on the relevance of philosophy to everyday life. For those of us who never had a chance to attend Foucault's lectures (at the College de France 500 audience members reportedly overflowed a 300 person lecture hall in order to hear Foucault make these weekly presentations of his previous year's research), reading these clearly translated lectures makes for a truly mind expanding experience, and I found these to be the most stimulating of the three lectures courses translated so far (although "Society Must be Defended" is really wonderful too!)

I repute this book one of the best because the class take the moment that Foucault discover subjectivity as more powerful than power, when secularization leave people free of religion. The book, as the other of collection, was done taking the tapes and Foucault`s class notes and rebuilding the class lesson. It`s very detailed, more than 550 pages. Foucault works with I and II century of Roman Empire, but he put it in perspective. Greeks and Roman Republic, Roman transition and then Roman democratic empire. He follows how epicureans, cynics and stoics reacts face the rise of Roman Empire. He tries to distinguish the parrhesi­a (fearless speech and freedom) as a different dimension between the Platonic epistrophe and the Christian metanoia vis a vis the transformation of the relationship of self care and self knowledge. After the rise of empire, public life becomes mundanity and the relationship between self care with self knowledge includes a conversion to yourself that differentiate parrhesi­a from epistrophe and metanoia. The last two had erased completely the meaning of parrhesía in the ancient world, deleting an original sense of truth and subjectivity where the subject was tied with the truth talked by himself. Epistrophe was the reminiscence of a past world/life, and the metanoi­a was the conversion to a new world/life, but parrhesia was the conversion to himself understood as the present and truth world/life. I think that the book is the Foucault`s "What Is The Philosophy?" The pages where he opposes paidea and parrhesi­a are a lesson about the difference between truth in mass media and truth in web media; the truth of blogosphere, forums and alike. The rescue of parrhesi­a`s meaning in the ancient society is a very actual problem and show ours spiritual and social troubles in a new light. The edition has a Frédéric Gros` essay in the end of the book that try to contextualize the Course and talk about all material in the Foucault`s notebooks that he will use in the last book about the flesh, and never used but in this class.