Abstract

The place which Christianity occupies in Michel Foucault’s work is often limited to the question of confession. Renewing the hypotheses formulated in Les anormaux [Abnormal] (1975) and La volonté de savoir [The Will to Knowledge] (1976), the lecture at the Collège de France Du gouvernement des vivants [On the Government of the Living] (1980) by-passes this question to go back to a more fundamental problem that Christianity had to face in the first centuries of our era: that of the relationship between salvation and perfection. The effort of former Christianity to separate salvation of perfection has major consequences on its definition of the self, which can not be considered as a principle of identity. The essential inconstancy of the Christian self, which makes it irreducible to the modern self, questions the too simple historical continuities.