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Foucault: The Culture of the Self,

These are the classic lectures on Care of the Self given in Berkeley CA April 12/13 1983 that traces the history of the cultivation of Self-Knowledge and Soul-Making within the Western (Greco-Roman) tradition. He concludes his lecture on this note:. The self is not so much something hidden and therefore something to be excavated but is a correlate of the technologies of self that it co-evolves with over millennium. r

This is followed by the question and answers session the day after the lecture in which Foucault sheds light on his archaeology and genealogy method. Foucault needs both methods to better understand humanity through its changes and repetitions. Described by the Stanford Encyclopedia as: “The premise of the archaeological method is that systems of thought and knowledge (epistemes or discursive formations, in Foucault’s terminology) are governed by rules, beyond those of grammar and logic, that operate beneath the consciousness of individual subjects and define a system of conceptual possibilities that determines the boundaries of thought in a given domain and period.”

…Foucault intended the term “genealogy” to evoke Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals, particularly with its suggestion of complex, mundane, inglorious origins—in no way part of any grand scheme of progressive history. The point of a genealogical analysis is to show that a given system of thought (itself uncovered in its essential structures by archaeology, which therefore remains part of Foucault’s historiography) was the result of contingent turns of history, not the outcome of rationally inevitable trends.”