About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self

Foucault elaborates the project of a history of “truth acts”—indicating by this expression “the part that falls to a subject in the procedures of alethurgy”—or better, “reflexive” truth acts, in which the subject is at once actor, witness, and object of the manifestation of

f operations on their own bodies, on their own souls, on their own thoughts, on their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, or to attain a certain state of perfection, of happiness, of purity, of supernatural power, and so on.

, from 1980, Foucault begins a vast project of genealogical research on the relations between subjectivity and truth in which a decisive role will be given to “techniques of the self,” that is to say, those techniques “which permit individuals to effect, by their own means [or with the help of other people], a certain nu