A espiritualidade ontem e hoje: Foucault e a hermenêutica de si

The purpose of this article presents the concept of hermeneutics of the self or spirituality that appears in the ’80s Foucault’s work in a course called A hermeneutic of the subject (L’herméneutique du sujet), given in 1982 at the College de France. In order to understand the presentation of this concept as rooted philosophically in his work, I have attempted to situate the way he perceived the birth and flourishing of the hermeneutic of the self during the period of Imperial Rome, its disappearance, in the Classics Age, and its resurrection in the XIX century. I attempted to explain the meaning of this historical perspective on a long range level, on a philosophical and historical horizon. I have henceforth attempted to articulate the ‘modus operandi’ called the ‘history of the modes of subjectiveness’, that characterizes his endeavour of the 1980s with the archaeology of knowing and the geneology of power that characterizes his research during the two previous decades. Thus I have attempted, properly speaking, to characterize spirituality as a form of the constitution of the self in itself as a parallel to the fabrication of the subject by the other in the formation of the subject as subjected.