I would like to put forward a few reflections concerning the course given by Foucault at the Collège de France in 1982:‘The Hermenetics of the Subject’. 1 First, it is important to note that the title of the course is misleading. For Foucault the term ‘hermeneutic’most often designates a specifically Christian subjective attitude (whose slow elaboration from Tertullian to Cassian Foucault describes, focusing on practices of penitence, in his 1980 collège course:‘The Government of the Living’). The hermeneutics of the self is the meticulous, analytical interpretation (déchiffrement) of one’s states of consciousness, the reading (lecture) of the traces of desire in one’s own thoughts, etc. That is to say, at base, everything implied by the practices of confession and avowal. In the 1982 course it is not a matter of describing these Christian techniques of the self, but rather of opposing them to others: the ‘spiritual exercises’(to borrow the expression of Pierre Hadot) elaborated in ancient philosophy.

Clearly, Foucault, in privileging the theme of the practices of the self, the techniques of subjectivation, and the historical interlacing (nouage) of subjectivity and truth, is no longer referring to the same subject he had denounced nearly 15 years earlier, on the occasion of the polemics provoked by the appearance of The Order of Things. 2 Foucault ceaselessly insisted on the fact that the subject implied by these techniques of the self, the arts of existence, is an ethical self rather than an ideal subject of knowledge (connaissance). That is, the subject is understood as transformable, modifiable. It is a subject that constructs