Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex

“The self is the battlefield where truth and power collide.”

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles stages a myth not only of tragic fate, but of an ontological unraveling—a dismantling of the self via an encounter with forbidden knowledge. Michel Foucault, in his later work on ethics and subjectivity, provides a powerful interpretive lens through which to reframe this ancient drama. For Foucault, the crux of ethical transformation lies not in obedience to law but in the aesthetic crafting of the self. Oedipus, in this sense, becomes a proto-modern subject who confronts the limits of power, truth, and self-knowledge—each entwined in a deadly loop.

The tragedy unfolds not as moral condemnation, but as what Foucault calls a subjectivizing process—a configuration where an individual becomes a subject through his own relationship to truth. Oedipus seeks truth to save Thebes, yet what he discovers is that the very foundations of his identity—his name, his lineage, his authority—are illusions. The uncovering of truth doesn’t liberate him; it annihilates the subject he believed himself to be.

In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault examines how ancient Greek ethics revolved not around prohibition but self-mastery and stylization of life. Oedipus’s downfall, then, is not due to transgressing a rule but to failing to recognize the limits of what a subject should seek to know. His relentless interrogation of oracles and witnesses violates the ancient ethos of sōphrosynē—temperance and measure. He does not exercise care of the self (epimeleia heautou) but imposes the sovereign rationality of the king onto the unknowable forces of fate.

Moreover, his tragedy reveals what Foucault called the double bind of parrhesia—the act of truth-telling. In exposing the truth, Oedipus loses his political legitimacy, his social body, and his personal dignity. Yet, this act also constitutes his moral redemption: in blinding himself and entering exile, he performs the very ethics of self-care that had previously been absent. He thus becomes not a sinner punished, but an exemplar of the self transformed through technologies of the self.

This Foucauldian reading reorients the aesthetic power of Oedipus Rex from a narrative of destiny to one of subjective rupture. The stage becomes a crucible where ancient regimes of truth, theodicy, and kingship collapse. It also forecasts the modern condition: where identities are no longer guaranteed by divine order or bloodline, but constructed precariously through one’s relation to knowledge, speech, and self-fashioning.

The essence of Oedipus Rex, then, lies in its dramatization of a discursive catastrophe—the moment when knowledge ceases to be external and becomes internal, when the self is made intelligible only through destruction. This aligns deeply with Foucault’s late ethics: that truth is not a passive mirror but a dangerous practice, and that only by undergoing crisis can the self be re-forged.

In this light, Oedipus Rex is not merely the story of a king undone, but of the first modern subject—the one who knows too much.