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In his article "Literature of the Self in Foucault: Parrhesia and Autobiographical Discourse" Álvaro Luque Amo analyzes the framework of Foucault’s study of the technologies of the self. In his study, Michel Foucault analyses the practices of self-writing in the Graeco-Roman period. From this perspective, Foucault approaches the texts of classical authors to interpret what he calls a process of ethopoiesis, or construction of the subject: a subject who tells the truth about himself in the text. Foucault introduces concepts and ideas that are essential to understanding the evolution of autobiography and literature of the self. This article studies this Foucauldian perspective with the aim of considering these texts as a precedent of modern literature of the self. First, Pierre Hadot’s objections to Foucauldian notions are discussed; secondly, this article analyses the concept of parrhesia as a precedent to a writing of truth. Lastly, all of the above is used in the final section of the article to connect Senecan texts with Montaigne’s Essays, by way of illustration of the main thesis.

In her article “Jewish Mysticism from Borges to Cirlot,” Erika Martínez discusses the form in which some Latin American and Spanish poets of the twentieth century have experimented, in a disruptive way, with the subjective possibilities of stillness and of time capable of overflowing. Foucault defended, in his last lectures, the construction of a new governmentality of self and of others. Among the many possible technologies to achieve it would be that of the writing of a poetry without words, knowing the insurrectional potentiality of silence. This provides us with a possible starting point for reading the post-secular revision of contemporary mysticism in Spanish. Starting from the Kabbalah, how have Huidobro, Borges, Gelman or Valente delved into an “I” capable of exercising uncertainty and being outside of self? How do they configure out of this discourse a non-subject, unsecured subjectivity, capable of growing even out of its own withdrawal?

In his article “Regaining the Subject: Foucault and the Frankfurt School on Critical Subjectivity” Miguel Alirangues sketches a possible meeting place in which two currents of critical thought (Adorno and Horkheimer, on the one hand, and Foucault, on the other) can come into dialogue. Without these two currents and, more crucially, without the dialogue between them, as he points out, we cannot today think of political antagonism towards the social structures of domination and therefore we cannot think of praxis and agency. The essay proceeds as follows: firstly, the author notes the places in which Foucault spoke of his relationship with the Frankfurt School, and the limits of his reading. He then addresses some relevant contributions regarding this relationship from the side of Critical Theory to propose a common ground between Foucault and the first generation of the Frankfurt School with respect to truth and subjectivity. Thus, he tries to bring Foucault closer to the positions of a rereading of the Frankfurt School. The intention is to provide some textual references that may show us today how this confluence may be of benefit to us when developing a conception of critical subjectivity.

In his article "Hesse's Steppenwolf as Modern Ethical Fiction" Michal Koza discusses the significance of "ethical fiction" in modern literature. Such fiction, according to Kant, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, are not only milestones of ethical thinking, but more importantly offer a narrative for self-creation as an ethical subject. Harry Haller, the protagonist of Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf, is a man living on the border of modern subjectivity embodying a cultural and existential crisis. Koza argues that "ethical reading" enables one to see the relation between philosophy and literature that not only enter in a dialogue with each other, but also share their crises, with the crisis of mimesis at the fore. Michal Koza, "Hesse's Steppenwolf as Modern Ethical Fiction" page 2 of 7 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 17.5 (2015): Special Issue Fiction and Ethics in the Twenty-first Century. Ed. Zhenzhao Nie and Biwu Shang

In her article "Akedah, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Law in Roth's 'Eli, the Fanatic'" Aimee L. Pozorski argues that Philip Roth's 1957 short story dramatizes the tension between the law on the one hand and the philosophy of ethics, on the other hand with the story's protagonist ultimately choosing ethics as evidenced by his identification with a displaced Hasidic Jew near the story's end. In reading the story through the inter-textual references to the Genesis story of the Akedah, Pozorski discusses the limits of the law in the face of vulnerable children and within the context of the history of the Holocaust. Aimee L. Pozorski, "Akedah, the Holocaust, and the Limits of the Law in Roth's 'Eli, the Fanatic'" page 2 of 8 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 16.2 (2014): Thematic Issue History, Memory, and the Making of Character in Roth's Fiction. Ed. Gustavo Sanchez-Canales and Victoria Aarons