Soon after being formulated in several texts from the second half of the 1970s, Foucault’s conception of power received significant criticism. However, no one seems to have been as critical of this conception as Foucault himself, in several courses, interviews, and lectures from the 1980s. This criticism sometimes is explicit but sometimes has to be deduced from the intellectual shift of these works. The article shows how Foucault gradually moves away from the thesis of ‘power relations’ as producers of subjectivity to propose the subject’s constitution from two related fields: a) the subject’s relation to himself and b) the subject’s relation to truth. Finally, we suggest the notion of ‘writing the of the self’ as a plausible extension of the concept of ‘care of the self’ as developed by Foucault in the 1980s.