Michael Hardt reviews Foucault’s 82-83 and 83-84 lecture courses – Le gouvernement de soi et des autres and Le courage de la vérité – in the latest New Left Review.

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Most of the first half of the review could have been written years ago, and doesn’t really say anything about the books. The second half does say some things but they are fairly general. The most intriguing part of the discussion is Hardt’s attempt to read a politics into Foucault’s last concerns:

The trajectory of the courses is thus incomplete; but through his analyses of these three periods Foucault already indicates the outlines of a powerful political project. In briefest summary one might say that the first passage—away from the democratic Athenian political terrain of the government of others to the Socratic paradigm of the care of the self—allows him to focus on life as the centre of transformation. Through a second passage, and with the aid of the Cynics, he brings this back to the field of politics as a militant, transformational life: from Pericles the virtuous orator, speaking the truth in public, to Socrates, the wise advocate of self-knowledge; and finally to Diogenes, the militant striving to create a new life that changes the world.