A series of lectures with a pivotal position in the evolution of Michel Foucault's thought. In these lectures, given at the College de France in the first quarter of 1980, Foucault continues the history of "regimes of truth," which permeates his entire teaching, giving it a major turn: his exploration, which had started in the field of criminal and judicial proceedings and had expanded to the political, with the theme of power-knowledge relations and later with the theme of governmentality, here moves into the field of practices and techniques of the self, into the field of ethics, which Foucault would never abandon again.

"How is it that in Western Christian civilization, the government of people asks, in addition to acts of obedience and submission, for "acts of truth" that have the peculiarity that the subject is not only required to tell the truth, but to tell the truth about himself, about his mistakes, his desires, the state of his soul, etc.?" Foucault wonders. This question leads him from a new reading of Sophocles' Oedipus the Tyrant to the analysis of the "acts of truth" that characterize primitive Christianity, through the practices of baptism, repentance, and guidance of conscience. Foucault focuses on the acts by which the faithful are led to the disclosure of their own truth as beings infinitely flawed. From the public expression of their sinful state in the ritual of repentance, to the thorough verbalization of their deepest thoughts in the examination of conscience, what we see being outlined is the organization of a pastoral economy focused on confession.