Il bios come aleturgia. Verità e vita nell'ultimo Michel Foucault

The aim of this work is to suggest a new way of interpreting the evolution of Michel Foucault’s later works, through the notion of regime de vérité. Using evidence provided by his courses at the Collège de France from 1980 to 1984, including many which remain unpublished, it investigates the role played by the concept of truth in some of the main “spiritual” regimes that Foucault sketches: Christian aleturgie, Platonic epistrophe, Stoic care of the self, Socratic parrhesia and Cynic vraie vie. This work also aims to underline the way in which the concept of truth progressively moves from an epistemological to a practical field, and the increasing relevance of the notion of life (bios) as a touchstone for truth itself: the Cynic vraie vie is the necessary conclusion of this path – truth is no longer a substantive (vérité), it becomes an adjective (vraie vie). In other words, with Cynicism, the problem of “spirituality” (i.e. the subject’s access to truth) is turned into the problem of the subject’s access to philosophical life, a question which must once again occupy a central role in contemporary philosophy