From Sexuality to the Care of the Self: Michel Foucault’s Californian Episode and the Turn to Practices of Subjectivation

Abstract

Michel Foucault’s 1975 trip to California is examined as an interpretive scene that sheds light on a broader shift in his work during the second half of the 1970s. Situated within the context of the development of The History of Sexuality, the so-called “Californian episode” helps clarify the transition from an analytics centered on the apparatuses of sexuality to a concern with subjectivation, care of the self, and technologies of the self. Drawing on a critical review of biographical sources, Foucault’s own writings, and contemporary interpretations—particularly those of Preciado, Butler, Halperin, and Eribon—it is argued that this episode should not be understood as the direct cause of Foucault’s intellectual turn, but rather as a privileged vantage point from which to grasp the conceptual reorientation that characterizes his later work. From this perspective, Foucault’s thought shifts from the study of apparatuses of power to an examination of the practices through which subjects shape their relation to themselves within historically constituted networks of knowledge and power. This approach makes it possible to reconsider the place of technologies of the self and care of the self as part of an expansion of Foucault’s analytics of power into the field of practices of subjectivation.