From governmentality to the genealogy of subjectivity: On Foucault's path in the 1980s

This paper will not to speculate upon the underlying intentions or motives behind Foucault's change from the 1970s to the 1980s. Instead, it goes back to the sources, especially the lectures he gave at the Collège de France , and elsewhere. ( 1 ) But it does not want merely to tell a story either. The limitations of space itself would forbid such an undertaking. Rather, the aim is to analyse these lectures, and Foucault's intellectual trajectory in general, in order to clarify a set of interrelated problems this change, or Foucault's last period, his work done between 1977 and 1984 poses; problems that were encountered in an attempt to use this body of work in concrete research.