Thoughts.

Stuck at chapter1. of GéometrieLa deDescartes. I need to study conicsections. I must push it until it falls, and move to thenextchapter. Ordered Eichmann in Jerusalem.AReportOnTheBanalityOfEvil. NaturalScience. MotherNature. Morality should be the beginning of all inquiry, not something else.
  Should start something.

Thoughts.

  Idea for examining propaganda in the films inUS.
  Chronicle Policy Domestic and Foreign.
  Axis of evil and Axis of Good, study the change.
  Someone wrote the screenplay from a beliefsystem, and someone directed it after accepting the beliefsystem.
  Study the liberal bias, whatever the fuck it is, in the sense ofChomsky. e.g. KentJones. Soderbergh. AmyTaubin.
  The beginning of the conclict, and the characters, the audiences, and the creators must solve it. Why is it a problem in the first place? Who created the problem before the beginning of the film?

  I have a pain in my chest. I might have a cardiacarrest soon.

  What I did today. Woke up. Jerked off. Ordered fromOYeahCafé. 15USD. Watched supplementary videos onChe2008. Found the hypocrisy and aloofness ofSoderbergh disgusting. Will readDiophantus ofAlexandria andHistory ofMath byCarlBBoyer. On a bus, Read the Artsection ofNYT, which somebody left on a seat. People likeKentJones wrote about the latest museumexhibitions. Yesterday. Finished Trust byGeorgeVHiggins. Read PhysicalEvidence byKentJones.

Propaganda succeeded. Example. Bujalski. NewYorkMagazine.

Director Andrew Bujalski invented mumblecore with his 2002 debut, Funny Ha Ha. His latest film, Computer Chess, stars the geeky competitors of an eighties virtual-chess tournament. These are the movies, books, TV shows, albums, and European countries that shaped his work.

1. Austin City Lights and Brookline Is My Lady (Public-access TV shows)

  Public access is always the best thing on TV. It’s the last stand of the avant-garde. Austin City Lights was this stunning show with a cast of eccentrics, including a strange woman named “Flash” Jordan Thomas and her mother, Lady B. I have a strong memory of them standing around singing a song they seemed to be making up on the spot. Brookline Is My Lady was a variety show from Boston in the nineties. Sketch-comedy stuff that you wouldn’t find in a more professional production.

2. Elvis Costello, Get Happy!!

  I’d happily trade whatever filmmaking ability I have for a fraction of his musical talent. Get Happy!! is my favorite Elvis album, but everything from the first ten years of his career is unbelievably good. After that, you get the sense that there’s less misery and terror fueling the work, and sometimes you miss that misery and terror, but the talent remains stunning.

3. Jimmy Carter

  His skills were huge and specific, but he just didn’t connect with people on a mass scale. He had a knack for being incredibly detail-oriented, at the expense of the big picture, but I don’t think anyone would question his virtue or diligence. I relate to that managerial style. I’m not as smart or virtuous as Jimmy Carter, but if I had to be any American president, I would probably fail in the same ways he did—not to call him a failure!

4. Broadcast News

  Casting William Hurt as a guy who’s not that smart was a stroke of genius. He’s a pretty smart dude, and it’s really hard to play a not-that-smart guy, but he’s so brilliant in that role. As a kid, it was probably a bad thing that I identified so much with Albert Brooks’s character. He’s a terrible model for adulthood. I’ve certainly gotten more sympathetic toward William Hurt’s character as I’ve grown older, maybe because I’ve become dumber.

5. Love Streams

  Love Streams has so many crazy, formal flourishes that aren’t what people associate with John Cassavetes, but it’s every inch a Cassavetes movie. It takes these incredible risks, yet they work, and it has the single most surreal moment in any movie in the bit near the end. I could not begin to explain to you what it is, but it’s stunningly resonant. It’s something I really admired and would love to be able to pull off.

6. William Eggleston’s Stranded in Canton

  It’s something Eggleston shot in the seventies but wasn’t released until 2005. It was shot on the Sony Portapak [camera] when that came out. There was also a documentary called William Eggleston in the Real World, which had some clips of this Portapak footage of Eggleston hanging out with his kooky, drug-addled friends in Memphis, and it’s fucking riveting! But I fell in love with the camera. I thought, What movie could I make in the language that this camera represents? There would be no Computer Chess without that camera.

7. Vampir-Cuadecuc

  This experimental filmmaker named Pere Portabella was on the set of Count Dracula with Christopher Lee, and the whole movie is just black-and-white 16-mm. footage of him hanging out. They’re shooting the movie and he’s off in a corner somewhere, filming them film the movie. I’d put it on my list of all-time best vampire movies. The opening is music and cars pulling into the parking lot, and we have that in the beginning of Computer Chess, and that was me trying to steal that mojo, even though it’s completely different in our movie. The vampire spirit can be anywhere.

8. New England Mobile Book Fair

  It’s a bookstore in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts, near my hometown. It’s not mobile—it’s a warehouse. It’s on the opposite end of the spectrum from Barnes & Noble, which smells like coffee and is nice to customers. Paperbacks were organized by publisher, then alphabetically by title, which made it impossible to find anything. You could only explore. I bought a $2 book of chess trivia ten years ago. That was what first sparked the notion of a computer-chess movie for me.

9. Joni Mitchell’s eighties albums

  I’ll be the jerk that argues with you that her eighties albums deserve another listen. They say her concerns had become more strident and impersonal and the records didn’t sound good, but I think that’s unfair. She was still the same stunningly brilliant melodist. Even in her most politically aggressive lyrics, I’m still onboard, whether or not I agree with what she’s saying.

10. The Rocky series

  I’m not being facetious when I say that it’s the closest thing to an American analogue for Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel movies—you really get to spend time with somebody. Rocky is less explicitly about the passage of time, but when you watch all of them, you can really feel it. There’s no actor in the world that I would rather work with than Stallone. That’s a long-standing fantasy for me. [One should “bend over”, and regard it as taste personal aesthetic.]

11. Paul McCartney, Silly Love Songs

  You’re supposed to like John the most, but I love all four Beatles—I’ll stand up for a couple Ringo records if you put a few drinks in me. But McCartney was the most fascinating personality. He’s never going out of his way to look cool: “You’d think that people would have had enough of silly love songs.” I have a similar feeling about that. As a filmmaker, I don’t mind putting something pleasant out into the world. I have a pitch for a McCartney musical. I haven’t quite worked the whole thing out, but he’s welcome to call me.

12. Kate Dollenmayer, Justin Rice, Tilly and Maggie Hatcher, and Patrick Riester

  The stars of my movies. For the first three, before I knew anything about them, I knew I wanted to write something for Kate [Funny Ha Ha], Justin [Mutual Appreciation], and for the Hatchers [Beeswax]. If Kate had woken up and thought, I’m not going to do this, then that project would have been over. It seemed a shortcut to guarantee a vital performance. With Patrick, I didn’t do that. We met a couple weeks before I started shooting Computer Chess. In retrospect, I can’t believe I didn’t have him there in mind, because he had that uncanny ability.

13. Eddie Murphy

  He was 19 when he started on Saturday Night Live and 23 when he did Beverly Hills Cop. You don’t think of Axel Foley as that young. But it works, because he was so confident. He’s hilarious, but he’s also an amazingly good actor. I have a pitch for him too. He’s a huge Elvis fan, and I have this fantasy of a movie where Eddie plays Elvis on the last day of his life. Elvis dies on the toilet and has a fever dream that he’s Eddie Murphy. I haven’t cracked that one yet.

14. Chantal Akerman (Harvard’s department of Visual and Environmental Studies)

  I studied film as an undergrad at Harvard, and she was my thesis adviser. She gave me two pieces of advice, which I haven’t taken yet. She told me girls wouldn’t like me until I stopped dressing like a 14-year-old, and that I should stop being pretentious and just make comedies. I think of Computer Chess as a comedy, but it probably behooves me to go out and make a real one sometime.

15. Brian De Palma

  De Palma will spend an hour of the movie whipping you into a frenzy, building the house of cards, and then end the movie gleefully knocking it down in a way that infuriates half the audience but is still commercially viable. And Lord knows I love his split screens. And I finally got to do them in Computer Chess, to put a few split screens in the movie. Not with the level of invention or meticulousness that he brings, but it was fun to pretend that I was De Palma for five minutes.

16. Game Theory, Real Nighttime

  The lead singer, Scott Miller, died recently, which really shook me. He had this complex relationship with his lack of fame, but somehow the fact that his bands never made it big seemed like part of why they stayed great. They just did great work for twenty-some years. Lolita Nation is probably their most beloved album, but song for song, I’ll take Real Nighttime over it. He was always bursting with ideas as a songwriter, and it feels absolutely effortless on this record.

17. Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset

  The crazier Heinlein’s books were, the more invested I was. He was the most sex-obsessed of sci-fi writers, which might be why he appealed to my adolescent self. In his last several books, there was this weird wish-fulfillment fantasy about incest—the rosiest view of incest I’ve ever read! To Sail Beyond the Sunset is pretty nuts and has the sexy cover. At the end, a woman falls in love with her father. There seems to be a hidden agenda there—he’s got some things he’s working on.

18. 16-mm.

  I don’t think there’s ever been a moment when I’m watching 16-mm. on a screen where I didn’t feel really happy. It’s hard for me to say how much of it is sentimental, because I worked with it in school. But when I think that maybe I should go out and get the RED camera, for me the trick of it is, how do you bring back the organic feel of the image, besides pressing the organic-filter button in Final Cut Pro? The simulacra get more and more convincing, but like Marvin Gaye sang, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing.”

19. Twin Peaks

  Everybody says it’s the golden age of TV now, but Twin Peaks is still the king in my book. These days, quality control has gotten stricter, because they don’t want a show as nuts as Twin Peaks. But I like when a show is unpredictable and goes off the rails. It’s one thing I’ve really enjoyed about Girls: You can have a goofy episode followed by something intense and dramatic. I don’t need to know where we’re headed every week.

20. “Filmed plays”

  This used to be a put-down: “That was just a filmed play. That wasn’t cinematic.” It could be referring to something that was adapted from a play or just a particularly talky movie, and it always made me sad, because I really liked those. The good ones are as cinematic as anything. It’s insane to look at a movie adaptation of Glengarry Glen Ross and say it’s not cinematic just because it has roots in another medium. It completely succeeds as cinema, as far as I’m concerned.

21. France

  I have an outdated fantasy that I become my generation’s Jerry Lewis and get adopted by France. That hasn’t happened yet. I was in France for about 24 hours. I’d taken French from seventh to eleventh grade, and I tried to bust it out, but they were not impressed. I had one very successful errand—I needed to get some pages Xeroxed, it was a lot to try to get right, but they didn’t bat an eye at me. But from there it was all downhill. The dream was over.

* This article originally appeared in the July 22, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.

Foucault. About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self. Footnotes. Political Theory. Vol. 21. no. 2. mai 1993.

1)      See Franços Leuret, Du traitement morale de la folie (Paris: J.B. Bailliere, 1840), and Foucault, Maladie mentale et psychologie, 3^rd ed. (Paris: PUF, 1966), 85-86; Mental Illness and Psychology, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 72.

2)      Edmund Husserl, Méditations Cartésiennes, translated by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Lewis (Paris: Arman Colin, 1931); Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorian Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973)

3)      “where society plays the role of subject” [Howison].

4)      “So much for the general project. Now a few words on Methodology. For this kind of research, the History of Science constitutes a privileged point of view. This might seem paradoxical. After all, the genealogy of the self does not take place within a field of scientific Knowledge, as if we were nothing else than that which rational Knowledge could tell us about ourselves. While the History of Science is without doubt an important testing ground for the Theory of Knowledge, as well as for the analysis of meaningful systems, it is also fertile ground for studying the genalogy of subject. There are two reasons for this. All the practices by which the subject is defined and transformed are accompnied by the formation of certain types of Knowledge, and in the West, for a variety of reasons, Knowledge tends to be organised around forms and norms that are more or less scientific. There is also another reason maybe more fundamental and more specific to our societies. I mean the fact that one of the main Moral obligations for any subject is to know oneself, to tell the truth about oneself, and to constitute oneself as an object of Knowledge both for other people and for oneself. The truthobligation for individuals and a scientific organisation of Knowledge; those are the two reasons why the History of Knowledge constitutes a privileged point of view for the gnealogy of the subject

  Hence, it follows that I am not trying to do History of Sciences in general, but only of those which sought to construct a scientific Knowledge of the subject. Another consequence. I am not trying to mesure the objective value of these Sciences, nor to know if they can become universally valid. That is the task of an epistemological historian. Rather, I am working on a History of Science that is, to some extent, regressive History that seeks to discover the discursive, the institutional, and the social practices from which these Sciences arose. This would be an archaeological History. Finally, the third consequence, this project seeks to discover the point at which these practices became coherent reflective techniques with definite goals, the point at which a particular discourse emerged from those techniques and came to be seen as true, the point at which they are linked with the obligation of searching for the truth and telling the truth. In sum, the aim of my project is to construct a genealogy of the subject. The method is an archaeology of Knowledge, and the precise domain of the analysis is what I should call technologies. I mean the articulation of certain techniques and certain kinds of discourse about the subject.

  I would like to add one final word about the practical significance of this form of analysis. For Heidegger, it was through an increasing obsession with techné as the only way to arrive at an understanding of objects, that the West lost touch with the Being. Let’s turn the question around and ask which techniques and practices from the western concept of the subject, giving it its characteristic split of truth and error, freedom and constraint. I think that it is here where we will find the real possibility of constructing a History of what we have done and, at the same time, a diagnosis of what we are. This would be a theretical analysis which has, at the same time, a political dimension. By this word ‘political dimension,’ I mean an anlysis that related to what we are willing to accept in our world, to accept, to refuse, and to change, both in ourselves and in our circumstances. In sum, it is a question of searching for another kind of critical Philo. Not a critical Philo. that seeks to determine the conditions and the limits of our possible Knowledge of the object, but a critical Philo. that seeks the conditions and the indefinite possibilities of transforming the subject, of transforming ourselves” [Howison]

5)      Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); The Order of Things, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1970).

6)      Naissance de la clinique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963, 1972); The Birth of the Clinic, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1973) and Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Discipline and Punish, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1977)

7)      La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976); The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978); L’Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Le Souci de soi (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); The Care of the self, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

8)      Jürgen Habermas, Erkenntnis und Interesse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkmap Verlag, 1968) and appendix in Technik und Wissenschaft als “Ideologie” (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968); Knowledge and Human Interests, translated by Jeremy Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1971), esp. “Appendix: Knowledge and Human Interests, A General Perspective,” 313.

9)      Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, edited by Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of massachusetts Press, 1988)

10)   “and known” [Howison].

11)   “and know themselves” [Howison].

12)   The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

13)   “as they spoke of it in the sixteenth century, of governing children, or governing family, or governing souls” [Howison].

14)   Resumé de cours, 1970-1982 (Paris: Julliard, 1989), 133-66; “Sexuality and Solitude,” London Review of Books 3, no. 9 (May 21-June 3, 1981): 3, 5-6.

15)   Seneca, “On Anger,” Moral Essays, Volume 1, translated by John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 340-41.

16)   La Souci de soi, 77-79; The Care of the Self, 60-62; “L’écriture de soi,” Crops écrit 5 (February 1983): 21.

17)   “all of them being a way to incorporate in a constant attitude a code of actions and reactions, whatever situation may occur” [Howison].

18)   Galen, “On the Diagnosis and Cure of the Soul’s Passions,” in On the Passions and Errors of the Soul, translated by Paul W. Harkins (Ohio State University Press, 1963).

19)   Plutarch, “How a Man May Become Aware of His Progress in Virtue,” in Moralia, Volume 1, translated by Frank Cole Babbitt, Loeb Classical Library (New York: Putnam, 1927), 400-57, esp. 436-57.

20)   Seneca, “On Tranquility of Mind,” in Moral Essays, Volume 2, translated by John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Havard University Press, 1935), 202-85, esp. 202-13.

21)   “But, through this confession, through this description of his own state, he asks Seneca to tell him the truth about his own state. Seneca is at the same time confessing the truth and lacking in truth” [Howison].

22)   “If the role of confession and consultation is to give place to truth as a force, it is easy to understand that selfexamination has nearly the same role. We have seen that if Seneca recalls every evening his mistakes, it is to memorise the Moralprecepts of the conduct, and Memory is nothing else than the force of the truth when it is permanently present and active in the soul. A permanent Memory in the individual and in his inner discourse, a persuasive Rhetorics in the master’s advice, those are the aspects of truth considered as a force. Then we may conclude selfexamination and confession may be in ancientPhilo. considered as truthgame, and important truthgame, but the objective of this truthgame is not to discover a secret Reality inside the individual. The objective of this truthgame is to make of the individual a place where truth can appear and act as a real force through the presence of Memory and the efficiency of discourse” [Howison].

23)   “In the earliest form of greekPhilo., poets and divine men told the truth to ordinary mortals through this kind of gnomé. Gnomai were very short, very imperative, and so deeply illuminated by the poetical light that it was impossible to forget them and to avoid their power. Well, I think you can see that self-examination, confession, as you find them, for instance, in Seneca, but also in Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and so on, even as lte as the first century A.D., self-examination and confession were still a kind of development of the gnomé” [Howison].

24)   “the mnemonic aptitue of the individual and” [Howison].

25)   “These depends in part on Arts of Memory and acts of persuasion. So, technologies of the self in the ancient world are not linked with an art of interpretation, but with arts such as Mnemotechniques and Rhetoric. Selfobservation, selfinterpretation, selfhermeneutics won’t intervene in the technologies of the self before Christianity” [Howison].

26)   [At the beginning of the second Howison lecture, Foucault said the following:] “Well, several persons asked me to give a short résumé of what I said last night. I will try to do it as if it were a good TV series. So, what happend in the first episode? Very few important things. I have tried to explain why I was interested in the practice of self-examination and confession. Those two practices seem to me to be good witnesses for a major problem, which is the genealogy of the modern self. The genealogy has been my obsession for years because it is one of the possible ways to get rid of a traditional Philo. of the subject. I would like to outline this genealogy from the point of view of techniques, what I call techniques of the self. Among these techniques of the self, the most important, in modern societies, is, I think, that which deals with the interpretive analysis of the subject, with the hermeneutics of the self. How was the hermeneutics of the self formed? This is the theme of the two lectures. Yesterday night, I spoke about Greek and Roman techniques of the self, or at least about two of these techniques, confession and self-examination. It is a fact that we meet confession and self-examination very often in the late Hellenistic and Roman Philo. Are they the archetypes of Christian confession and self-examination? Are they the early forms of the modern hermeneutics of the self? I have tried to show that they are quite different from that. Their aim is not, I think, to decipher a hidden truth in the depth of the individual. Their aim is something else. It is to give force to truth in the individual. Their aim is to constitute the self as the ideal unity of the will and the truth. Well, now let us turn toward Christianity as the cradle of the western hermeneutics of the self.”

27)   “at least in the catholic branch of Christianity” [Howison].

28)   “obligations not only to believe in certain things but also to show that one believes in them. Every christian is obliged to manifest his fath” [Howison].

29)   “If the gnomic self of the Greek philosophers, of which I spoke yesterday evening, had to be built as an identification between the force of the truth and the form of the will, we could say that there is a gnostic self. This is the gnostic self that we can find described in Thomas Evangilium or the Manicean texts. This gnostic self has to be discovered inside the individual, but as a part, as a forgotten sparkle of the primitive light” [Howison].

30)   Technologies of the Self, 39-43.

31)   Tertullian, “On Repetance,” in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by A.Roberts and J.Donaldson (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmands, n.d., repr. 1979), 657-68, esp. “Exomologesis,” chaps. 9-12, 664-66.

32)   Jerome, “Letter LXXVII, to Oceanus,” in the Principal Works of St.Jerome, translated by W.H.Freemantle, vol. 6 in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1893), 157-62, esp. 159-60.

33)   Cyprian, “Letter XXXVI, from the Priests and Deacons Abiding in Rome to Pope Cyprian,” in Saint Cyprian: Letters (1-81), 90-94 at 93, translated by Sister Rose Bernard Donna, C.S.J., vol. 51 in the Fathers of the Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964).

34)   “This form, attested to from the end of the second century, will subsist for an extremely long time in Christianity, since one finds its after-effects in the orders of penitents so important in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. One can see that the procedure for showing forth the truth are multiple and complex in it. Certain acts of exomologesis take place in private but most are addressed to the public” [Howison].

35)   “The greater part of the acts which constitue penance has the role not of telling the truth about the sin; it has the role of showing the true being of the sinner, or the true sinful being of the subject. The Tertullian expression, publicatio sui, is not a way to say the sinner has to explain his sin. The expression means he has to produce himself as a sinner in his Reality of sinner. And now the question is why the showing forth of the sinner should be efficient to efface the sins” [Howison].

36)   “On Repentance,” chap.10.

37)   “The day of judgement, the devil himself will stand up to accuse the sinner. If the sinner has already anticipated him by accusing himself, the enemy will be obliged to remain quiet” [Howison].

38)   “It must not be forgotten that the practice and the theory of penitence were elaborated to a great extent around the problem of the relapsed... The relapsed abandon the faith in order to keep the life of here below” [Howison].

39)   “In brief, penance insofar as it is a reproduction of martyrdom is an affirmation of change – of rupture with one’s self, with one’s past metanoia, of a rupture with the world, and with all previous life” [Howison]

40)   See esp. St.JohnChrysostom, “Homily XLII,” on Matthew 12:33, in St.Chrysostom: Homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, edited by Phillip Schaff, vol. 10 in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, repr. 1975), 271.

41)   John Cassian, De Institutiones Coenobiorum and Collationes Patrum, edited by PhillipSchaff, in vol.11 of A Select Library of Nicene and Postnicene Fathers (Grand Rapids, MI: eerdmands, repr. 1973).

42)   “this is the soul that Cassian described with two greek words [undecipherable]. It means that the soul is always moving and moving in all directions” [Howison].

43)   “and the Greek fathers called diacrisis” [Howison].

44)   “What I would like to insist upon this evening is something else, or at least, something indirectly related to that. There is something really important in the way Cassian poses the problem of truth about the thought. First of all, thoughts (not desires, not passions, not attitudes, not acts) appear in Cassian’s work and in all the spirituality it represents as a field of subjective data which have to be considered and analysed as an object. And I think that is the first time in History that thoughts are considered as possible objects for an analysis. Second, thoughts have to be analysed not in relation to their object, according to objective experience, or according to logical rules, they have to be suspected since they ca ben secretly altered, disguised in their own substance. Third, what man needs if he does not want to be the victim of his own thoughts is a perpeutal hermeneutics interpretation, a perpeutal work of hermeneutics. The function of this hermeneutics is to discover the Reality hidden inside the thought. Fourth, this Reality which is able to hide in my thoughts is a power, a power which is not of another nature than my soul, as is, for instance, the body. The power which hides inside my thoughts, this power is of the same nature of my thoughts and of my soul. It is the Devil. It is the presence of somebody else in me. This constitutions of the thoughts as a field of subjective data needing an interpretive analysis in order to discover the power of the other in me is, that is, I think, if we compare it to the Stoic technologies of the self, a quite new manner to organise the relationships between truth and subjectivity. I think that thermeneutics of the self begins there” [Howison].

45)   John Cassian, Second Conference of Abbot Moses, chap. 11, 312-13 at 312, in vol.11 of A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, edited by PhiLIP Shaft and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1955).

46)   “a power of diacrisis, of differences” [Howison].

47)   “for the rupture of the self” [Howison].

48)   Technologies of the Self, 43-49.

49)   “, what I call the gnomic self. In the beginning of the lecture, I indicated that the gnostic movements were a question of constituting an ontological unity, the Knowledge of the soul and the Knowledge of the being. Then, what could be called the gnostic self could be constituted in Christianity” [Howison].

50)   “The centrality of the confession of sins in Christianity finds an explanation here. The verbalisation of the confession of sins is institutionalised as a discursive truthgame, which is a sacrifice of the subject” [Howison].

51)   “In addition, we can say that one of the problems of western culture was: How could we save the hermeneutics of the self and get rid of the necessary sacrifice of the self which was linked to this hermeneutics since the beginning of Christianity” [Howison].

52)   “which we have inherited from the first centuries of Christianity? Do we need a positive man who serves as the foundation of this hermeneutics of the self?” [Howison].

53)   “or maybe to get rid of those technologies, and then, to get rid of the sacrifice which is linked to those technologies” [Howison].