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An entire historical tradition (theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity - as a teleological movement or a natural process. "Effective" history, however, deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations.
(Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" 154)2
In volume three of the History of Sexuality Michel Foucault outlines a, new form of the subject's relation to himself (and in the texts Foucault examines, the subjects are men) characteristic of the Roman imperial period. This new model of sub j activation, which he terms "care of the self," 'le souci de soi,' possesses certain clear continuities with the classical period's ethic of self-mastery, but is not characterized by the same set of isomorphic relations between personal, domestic and political structures of power that Foucault claims is found in fourthcentury Greece.3 The texts on which he bases his depiction are primarily medical, philosophical, and prescriptive texts from the first and second centuries C. E.4
It has long been recognized that the structures governing the subject's relation to both itself and the community at large had altered in some fundamental way during the late Hellenistic period in Greece and the early imperial period in Rome. In general, this change has been taken to represent a heightened individualism among the upper classes as the increasingly monarchical structure of both Rome and the Hellenistic kingdoms shut offaccess to the traditional public arenas of self-valorization for the ruling elite of the Mediterranean world: individual military glory and city-state politics. This growth in individualism is often said to represent also the articulation of a new heightened sense of interiority that is seen as laying the groundwork for Christianity's concern with the salvation of the individual soul (Foucault, LSDS 55/41, 57/43 and 103/83; LUDP 74/63).5 Foucault, while not rejecting outright this common narrative, radically questions its teleological construction of a growth in individualism, which is depicted as a mere epiphenomenon of underlying political change.
What I propose in this paper is to perform a similarly critical reading of Foucault's own narrative. I want to save those elements that represent clear improvements over his predecessors: the anti-teleological thrust of his argument; the problematization of the concept of individualism (which throws into question the...