  Michel Foucault (1926–84) followed Nietzsche in aspiring to uncover the ‘genealogy’ of various contemporary forms of thought and practice (he was concerned, for example, with our treatment of sexuality and mental illness), and how relations of power and domination have produced ‘discourses of truth’ (“Truth and Power,” Power, 131). In his later work he described four different aspects of the ‘practice of the self’: We select the desires, acts, and thoughts that we attend to morally, we recognize ourselves as morally bound by some particular ground, e.g., divine commands, or rationality, or human nature, we transform ourselves into ethical subjects by some set of techniques, e.g., meditation or mortification or consciousness-raising, and finally, we propose a ‘telos’ or goal, the way of life or mode of being that the subject is aiming at, e.g., self-mastery, tranquility or purification. Foucault criticized Christian conventions that tend to take morality as a juristic and often universal code of laws, and to ignore the creative practice of self-making. Even if Christian and post-Christian moralists turn their attention to self-expression, he thought they tend to focus on the confession of truth about oneself, a mode of expression which is historically linked to the church and the modern psycho-sciences. Foucault preferred stressing our freedom to form ourselves as ethical subjects, and develop ‘a new form of right’ and a ‘non-disciplinary form of power’ (“Disciplinary Power and Subjection,” Power, 242). He did not, however, tell us much more about what these new forms would be like.