Taking his point of departure in Foucault’s work from the mid to late 1970s, Professor de Beistegui will argue that the lecture courses and books from that period lay the ground for a genealogy of the western subject as a subject of desire. Beyond Foucault’s own genealogy, he’ll ask about the connections and tensions between the rationalities of the sexual instinct and economic interest , and suggest that they require a third rationality, and a third sense of desire, which involves the Law and the symbolic order, the significance of which Foucault recognizes, but doesn’t explore.