“From the 1970s there has been an effort to reconstruct a theory of the subject as agent of change” (Poster 1989,61). A number of commentators are in general agreement with this statement, although the dates may vary slightly. In France, for example, Foucault’s return to the “technologies of the self” in the last two volumes on sexuality published in his last year, 1984, appears to parallel an overall tendency in the eighties to challenge the poststructural attack on the autonomy of the subject in terms of the political dangers of maintaining such a position. This return often ignores the complexities of the poststructural critique (Dews 1987, xii ff.). In Foucault the return is not, however, to metaphysics, but to a “historical ontology.”