Techniques of finitude: on the pastoral matrix of economic care

Abstract

Building and expanding on Foucault’s work, this essay interprets pastoral power as a turning point within the long-term history of the care of the self. Through an analysis of early Christian monasticism, it claims that the pastorate emerged out of a re-conceptualization of ancient understandings of human finitude and a correlative transformation of the techniques revolving around it. Pastoral power instantiates a specific way of framing institutionally the subject’s opening to the limits. The argument thus suggests how, and to what extent, this matrix of government still determines, albeit under a different guise, the current political phase, especially in as far as economic governmentality and its call to the indefinite self-enhancement of subjectivity are concerned.