Abstract

This essay reconstructs Foucault's lectures on the »Hermeneutics of the Self« as a critique of the Cartesian model of self-knowledge and as an attempt to rehabilitate, with reference to Kant, a form of life centered on the own self. Critical evaluation of this »anachronistic« version of the hermeneutics of the self focuses on the issue of how this philosophical approach to the self can or should confront the question what and who we are.