kind of self from the barbarism of what is still called the past. Transcript In our last lecture we discussed Habermas and I think that we left out at least one thing I need to begin with before I proceed with Foucault and that's Habermas' view of the self as a thoroughly social being, that is; the interaction of the natural world , the social world and the inner world of human, as it were, suffering, sympathy; a subject entwined in desire. Those are the three dimensions to subjectivity that Habermas discusses and he sees each one as challenged in the late 20th Century; so I wanted to add that to maintain our subject under siege theme. Habermas' account that I have just finished is, as it were, one of the more optimistic accounts -- if you will use a word that simple it's one of the more optimistic accounts -- but it still does not relieve the subject of the incredible pressure to construct meaning and conditions for communication under conditions that are very unfavourable for that to occur. I mean, that's still part of his account. We will now move on to a thinker who at least in a couple of respects is like Habermas and that is a magnificent... it's hard to characterise him as a philosopher and no-one knows exactly where to put his books; we don't know whether he is a historian, a philosopher, a sociologist, in fact that's almost the mark of late 20th