Thanks to all the commentators for providing a series of well-reasoned and challenging comments. Many of these concerns are at once a product of stuff left on the cutting room floor, while others have been indirectly addressed in some recent publications. What I want to briefly do is highlight some of the criticisms that I agree with and engage a few salient points of contention.

It has been widely claimed that Foucault's 1980 lecture course at the Collège de France, On the Government of the Living (GL), constituted an important turning point in his thinking. That course would begin a series of lecture courses at the Collège that would end in March 1984, just before his death, all devoted to core issues arising in Hellenistic philosophy and Christian theology. While Christian practices of penance and confession are a focus of GL, as Mark Jordan has claimed, throughout what has been termed his “Greco-Roman” trip Foucault always emphasized “the historical importance of pastoral power for modern subjectivity.” There is, then, a definite link between what is often described as the “final Foucault,” with his interest in Patristic Christianity and its own governmental practices, on one hand, and, on the other, the broader question of “government,” both of the self and of others, as well as the historical modes of subject formation, all concerns that characterized the whole of Foucault's oeuvre. Indeed, as Foucault says in his conclusion to GL, the obligation “to tell the truth about oneself” has shaped not just Christianity, but Western modernity too; indeed “the whole social system to which we belong” (312).