Beyond phenomenological anti-sociologies: Foucault's "care of his self" as standpoint sociology

Abstract

A generation ago, Foucault's untimely death meant that his final genealogical investigations were never transformed into published monographs. However, with the publication of his last 3 years of lectures at the College de France, new insights have been revealed about the self in Antiquity (and the present day). Specifically, this paper will argue that Foucault's final investigations reveal (i) a theorization of the Hellenistic self which "cares for itself" so as to gain "access to the truth" from within an existing "agonistic" field; (ii) an oppositional "standpoint" self which goes beyond those found in the phenomenological, anti-sociology tradition; and (iii) Foucault's apparent acknowledgement that he had tacitly "cared for himself".