A relação entre cuidado de si e cuidado dos outros : o significado da crítica de Michel Foucault ao “poder pastoral” para a poimênica cristã

Abstract

In recent years, the debates on the “limits of help” in several helping professions lead to a new appraisal of the relationship between help to others and self-help, between care of others and care of oneself. On the basis of insights and analyses of Michel Foucault’s work, particularly in its final stadium, the article tries to understand the transition from classical Antiquity, in which the focus was on the care of oneself as the core of ethics, to a period in which the focus is displaced to the care of others. Christian ethics has to do with that displacement, which entails some problems that have led to the aforementioned debates. New relations in the “micro-physics of power” could lead to a new balance between these two dimensions, and practical theology has to deal with this issue in the realm of its own reflections.