ABSTRACT
Introduction Michel Foucault, when he is read in the company of the many other significant thinkers on the self and on identity gathered in this collection, may well – and, indeed, should – be perceived as an ‘outsider’. The reason for this is that Foucault is not, in any meaningful sense, a theorist of self or identity. Rather, his major contribution to this field is the contrary of a theoretical one: he gives us a series of empirical studies, using the standard historical approach of documentary analysis, of how the self has, at various important junctures, been problematised in terms of the relation it has to itself. Yet Foucault’s interest was not so much in a kind of relativised, historically changing self, but in the differing types of relations the self has established with itself; and, moreover, in the differing types of relations the self has established with others, especially to the extent that these self-other relationships are typically relations of power or government. Additionally, we can say that, for Foucault, the self is simply one of any number of ways in which human beings have given meaning to their experiences of themselves. It just so happens to be our current mode of experience, and for that reason alone, is of special interest to us. Still further, we can state that the focus of Foucault’s enquiries was more upon the systems which have been invented to problematise the self, rather than upon the self which is the result of those very systems.
