Two Conversions: The Oldest Technology of the Self
Between Platonic Epistrophē and the Christian Metanoia
At this stage in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, the problem of care reaches a point of internal differentiation. What has already been established as a culture, a therapy, and a discipline of subjectivity now demands a more precise description of its operative form. Foucault names this form conversion to the self. The term is familiar, even overdetermined, but the experience it designates in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy does not coincide with the models that later dominate Western thought.
This is not a conversion as a doctrinal category, nor as a dramatic existential event, but as a practical schema that organizes attention, conduct, and effort over time. Conversion functions less as a moment than as a continuous reorientation. It names a way of redistributing one’s relation to oneself, to the world, and to what one depends on.
Two displacements already secured in the previous lectures make this schema intelligible. First, the care of the self has been detached from pedagogy. It is no longer a corrective addressed to youth at a decisive threshold. It becomes valid across the whole course of existence. The art of living coincides with the work of the self on itself. Second, care has been detached from political finality. One no longer cares for oneself in order to rule others. The justification of care lies entirely within the subject’s relation to himself. Relations to others follow as consequences, not as aims.
Once these displacements are in place, the motif of turning toward oneself acquires its full significance. Ancient texts return to this image insistently, without ever elevating it into a formal concept. Conversion operates as a diagram rather than a doctrine. It organizes movement without naming a destination outside the subject’s own conduct.
This is why Foucault insists on distinguishing this schema from its two dominant neighbors.
Platonic epistrophē is structured by transcendence. The subject turns away from appearances, recollects truth, and ascends toward an ontological origin. Self-knowledge is inseparable from knowledge of what truly is. Liberation is achieved through access to truth.
Christian metanoia is structured by rupture. Conversion appears as an event that cuts life in two. The old self dies. A new being is born. Renunciation, confession, and salvation presuppose a break internal to the subject, a discontinuity that redefines identity.
The conversion at work in Hellenistic and Roman philosophy belongs to neither configuration. It unfolds entirely within immanence. Nothing is recollected. Nothing is confessed. Nothing is overthrown. The movement is neither vertical nor catastrophic. It proceeds by redistribution rather than replacement.
What changes is the axis of dependence. The subject withdraws investment from what does not depend on him and concentrates attention on what does. External events, fortune, reputation, and the lives of others lose their hold. What replaces them is not interior depth, but a relation of availability to oneself.
This explains why the metaphors that structure these texts are not hermeneutic, they are rather athletic and tactical. The archer does not interpret his arm. He corrects his aim. The runner does not search for a hidden truth of movement. He maintains rhythm and direction. The work involved is not decipherment, but alignment.
Presence to oneself, in this sense, does not take the form of reflexive knowledge. It takes the form of vigilance. The subject remains attentive to deviation, tension, and drift. What must be monitored is not interior meaning, but the distance between intention and conduct. The self is not grasped as an object. It is sustained as a trajectory.
This also clarifies the role of the gaze. Turning one’s gaze toward oneself does not inaugurate introspection. It requires, first of all, turning away from others. Plutarch’s critique of polupragmosynē is decisive on this point. Curiosity is not presented as a desire to know, but as a form of dispersion. A pleasure taken in the affairs, misfortunes, and intimacies of others. A mode of attention that fragments the subject.
To suspend curiosity is therefore not moral purification. It is reorganization of attention. Concentration replaces dispersion. The gaze is no longer scattered across events and lives that do not concern the subject’s own conduct. It is gathered and held.
What emerges from this practice is a relation to oneself oriented toward endurance rather than revelation. The subject does not pass through a moment of truth that transforms him once and for all. He works continuously to remain aligned with himself. The effort is corrective, repetitive, and without spectacle.
This is why the term conversion must be handled carefully. Nothing is renounced in the Christian sense. Nothing is recollected in the Platonic sense. The subject is neither split nor reborn. He is freed without being remade. The work consists in establishing a stable relation to oneself that resists both external domination and internal dispersion.
This configuration will not remain untouched. Knowledge will reassert its claims. Truth will demand speech. The requirement to say who one is will gradually displace the effort to remain capable of oneself. But at this point in the course, a distinct ethical form becomes visible. A relation to oneself that precedes introspection, resists rupture, and remains irreducible to knowledge