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What Does “Take Care of Yourself” Mean? The History of a Phrase

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“Socrates says three important things with regard to his invitation to others to occupy themselves with themselves: (1) His mission was conferred on him by the gods…(2) For this task he demands no reward… (3) His mission is useful for the city more useful than the Athenians military victory at Olympia - because in teaching people too occupy themselves with themselves, he teaches them to occupy themselves with the city. Eight centuries later, one fi nds the same notion and the same phrase in Gregory of Nyssa’s treatise, On Virginity , but with an entirely different meaning. Gregory did not mean the movement by which one takes care of oneself and the city; he meant the movement by which one renounces the world and marriage and detaches oneself from the fl esh and, with virginity of heart and body, recovers the immortality of which one has been deprived.” — Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self 1. The Same Words In Technologies of the Self , Michel Foucault draws attention to a ...
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Before Consent: Foucault, Chomsky, and the Organization of Public Discourse

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1. The Problem: From Discourse to Public Discourse Michel Foucault’s The Order of Discourse and Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent begin from different problems. Foucault is concerned with the procedures through which discourse is controlled, selected, organized, and redistributed. Herman and Chomsky are concerned with the institutional mechanisms through which mass media select and shape the information that reaches the public. One examines the order of discourse; the other examines the political economy of its circulation. Yet read together, the two works illuminate a problem that neither addresses from exactly the same angle: what happens between something functioning as discourse and something becoming publicly consequential? Not everything that can be said acquires the same conditions of circulation. A statement may be grammatically possible, intellectually coherent, legally publishable, and still remain marginal. Another may be repeated across newsp...
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The Glove and the Text: Foucault, Derrida, and the Problem of the Outside

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il n'y a pas de hors-texte. AI image   Part I — The Glove and the Problem of Exteriority 1. The Glove In a 1966 interview about The Order of Things , Michel Foucault describes the position from which he approaches his own culture in an unusual way. He wants to look at it as an ethnologist might look at a foreign culture: to make familiar forms of thought appear strange, and to investigate the rules that organize them without simply taking those rules for granted. But this immediately creates a problem. The ethnologist can imagine herself as an observer of another culture. Foucault cannot occupy the same position with respect to his own culture. He is investigating the very field that makes his investigation possible. The categories, distinctions, and forms of intelligibility through which he approaches his object belong to the historical formation he is trying to understand. This is where the image of the glove becomes significant. Foucault suggests that thought would have ...
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