Seuils et discontinuités chez Michel Foucault : vers un sujet “<italic>post-cartésien” </italic>?

Drawing from Michel Foucault's final research development (1980-1984), this article disputes Foucault's apparent discontinuity with his previous stands regarding the subject, and unveils a notion I propose to call the “post-Cartesian” subject, <italic>i.e.</italic> a subject whose ethics displays a congruent harmony between <italic>mathêsis</italic> (knowledge) and <italic>prâxis</italic> (action). Spending his last years in the company of Greco-Roman thinkers for whom philosophizing was less a <italic>mathêsis</italic> than a <italic>prâxis</italic>, Foucault claims that the disruption of the congruence between <italic>logos</italic> and <italic>ergon</italic> occurred at the beginning of Christianity, when the Delphic injunction “know thyself” (<italic>gnôthi seauton</italic>) took over a precept which had formerly ruled supreme: the “care of the self” (<italic>epimeleia heautou</italic>). Foucault asserts that Descartes ultimately confirmed this displacement, when the Cartesian subject was no longer required to go through any personal transformation in order to reach truth/knowledge. Challenging this threshold, I argue that the Socratic imperative has not supplanted the “care of the self” in the “post-Cartesian” subject whose task is to resist as much as possible the type of existence/identity which has been impressed on her/him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]