How can we understand Foucault’s work on ancient philosophy, and its practices of truth-telling and technologies of the self? While this late phase in Foucault’s thought has often been seen as marking an ethical turn, away from the explicit political stakes of his earlier works, this book articulates the continuities between his engagement with antiquity and political events in his own present.

Beginning with a reinterpretation of the question of early and late style in Foucault’s oeuvre, this investigation provides careful readings of his lectures at the Collège de France, showing how the care of the self – the style of existence – unfolds as a critical project. With the notion of the subject developed in Foucault’s late work, the ancient practices of truth-telling can be articulated with modern economic government, introducing a radically new understanding of the concept of critique.

Karl Katz Lydén is a writer and critic, editor of Found Review, Swedish translator of Foucault, and author of Poems and Parables on the Political Utility of Art (Bom Dia Books, 2021).