Abstract

The starting point of Foucault’s itinerary through subjectivity is the recognition that there is an exceptional experience in which we can recognize ourselves as a subject. What is this experience? How to determine its limits? In my opinion, Foucault’s itinerary through subjectivity was determined by two intuitions which reign in the area of our self-experience. The first is the intuition which follows an expression in which what is mine becomes outer. The other one is, as opposed to the first, the intuition of immanence. Foucault maintains that in the two cases of this experience we find the same: the norms of being a self and the facticity of losing oneself in the self. Thus, in the extreme and specific limit-experience of “being the self” beyond “being a subject” this tacit border between norms and facticity discloses, and the historicity of subjectivity becomes evident. The normal/ normative self is not only a basis for modes of being for human beings but, of course, a basis for their recognition as a subject. In the consequence, the interplay of “the truth obligation’” and the modes of being plays a constitutive role in the western “culture of the self”. In the paper I imply that Foucault’s itinerary through subjectivity has three stages: archeological, genealogical, and hermeneutical. In all these stages of Foucault’s quest for the history of subjectivity, this interplay has a crucial function.