“How do human beings constitute themselves as subjects? …If the fundamental exercise of power over individuals is their own confessional interpretation of themselves, then a study of networks of power inevitably leads to a dismantling analysis of the technologies of the self– to what Michel Foucault has called a genealogy of the subject in Western society. This extraordinary enterprise has led Michel Foucault to crucial reevaluations of political freedom and resistance.

If we are acted upon most effectively by power relations internal to our own sense of ourselves, then the resistance to power must perhaps take the form, ultimately, of an unprecedented, non-ascetic, perhaps anarchic form of self-repudiation. Michel Foucault’s study of the culture of self is therefore inseparable from the prospect of promoting new forms of subjectivity.”

The Culture of the Self, Part 1 of 7