ABSTRACT
With a rich variety of newly available material, including the posthumous publication of Confessions of the Flesh and the archiving of his notes and unpublished manuscripts at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, we are now better able to see the concrete side of Foucault’s writing process, and also to understand the scholarly, social, and political stakes involved both at the time he began this work and in its later reception. There were two strands to Foucault’s “return to Antiquity”: first, a history of sexuality that, rather than treating “sexuality” as a suprahistorical constant, traces the genealogy of the “desiring subject” and the modern and contemporary apparatus of sexuality; second, the genealogy of the relations between subjectivity and truth, which Foucault defines in terms of a genealogy of the modern (Western) subject. This introductory chapter also explains the transdisciplinary project of the book, which brings philosophers, historians, anthropologists of antiquity, and psychoanalysts into dialogue.
