Spiritualità e critica. L'ultimo Foucault e la verità del sé tra gli antichi e i moderni

Three studies compose the thesis. The main one consists of a historical-philosophical reconstruction of the genealogy of the modern subject in the late Foucault, that focuses on the technologies of self-knowledge. The nexus between ancient spirituality and modern critique is therefore analyzed following the way in which Foucault’s interpretation of Enlightenment orients his researches on spiritual self-knowledge practices in Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus and, in return, defining the aspects of Roman Stoicism that inform Foucault’s recognition of critique as a reflexive practice, in his last reading of Kant’s “Beantwortung”. The second proposes a hypothetical philological reconstruction of the last unpublished book project by Foucault, “The care of the self” (more commonly known with the title “The government of the self and the others”), by presenting the transcription of ten unpublished manuscripts preserved in Paris at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fonds Michel Foucault. The last one offers a commentary of Nietzsche’s “Genealogy of Morality” and several contemporary posthumous fragments, highlighting the significant role played in it by ascetic practices, as Foucault understood them: they appear to be at the same time decisive in the historical triumph of the ascetic ideal and a central technology towards the transvaluation of values announced by Nietzsche.