ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that we discover an extensive and detailed treatment of resistance in Foucault’s late 1970s and early 1980s engagement with the intrinsically interrelated notions of care of the self and parresia, that is, truth- or frank-speaking. The material scrutinised comprises a plethora of Foucault’s other texts in which he elaborates the notions of care of the self and parresia. As Foucault recurrently emphasises, especially when elaborating on Stoic sources, philosophical truth discourses and associated ascetic practices work to prepare the subject for struggles against different modes of power, ranging from the sovereign power, and the brutal threat of violence and death, to the ‘softer’, conductive and persuasive variants of government.
