Ethics and politics in Michel Foucault.

The aim of this paper is to analyze how, according to Michel Foucault's ideas, the investigation of the ethics of care of the self might be considered the unfolding of the idea of governmentality, problematized in 1978; we also aim at indicating that this ethics of care of the self is the basis for the political government of others according to the Socratic tradition, and that makes a revisitation of politics possible. However, from Foucault's evaluation of Socrates's view of the Athenian politics until his diagnosis of contemporary politics, this revisitation has been conflicting, at least concerning the way the political institutions care for the citizens. This conflict seems to be paradoxical because, at the same time that biopolitics makes a statement about a politics of life, for it provides its care, preservation, longevity, it is also possible to notice the act of a politics about life, for life is controlled by and subject to biopower. This discrepancy between discourse devices and effective practices reveals an absence of care for truth, understood as the coherence between what is said and what is done. As an unfolding of care of the self, the care for truth might be interpreted as a fundamental reading key for the diagnosis of risks and dangers that recurrently threaten human life.