更新一下，更原始的文本是来自福柯在 1983 年的一篇关于“自我写作”的文章： Foucault, Michel. “Self Writing.” Translated fromCorps écritno 5 (Feb. 1983): 3-23 . 里面通篇都在说这个事情：

The Vita Antonii of Athanasius presents the written notation of actions and thoughts as an indispensable element of the ascetic life.“Let this observation be a safeguard against sinning: let us each note and write down our actions and impulses of the soul as though we were to report them to each other; and you may rest assured that from utter shame of becoming known we shall stop sinning and entertaining sinful thoughts altogether. Who, having sinned, would not choose to lie, hoping to escape detection? Just as we would not give ourselves to lust within sight of each other so if we were to write down our thoughts as if telling them to each other, we shall so much the more guard ourselves against foul thoughts for shame of being known. Now, then, let the written account stand for the eyes of our fellow ascetics, so that blushing at writing the same as if we were actually seen, we may never ponder evil. Molding ourselves in this way, we shall be able to bring our body into subjection, to please the Lord and to trample under foot the machinations of the Enemy.” Here, writing about oneself appears clearly in its relationship of complementarity with reclusion: it palliates the dangers of solitude; it offers what one has done or thought to a possible gaze; the fact of obliging oneself to write plays the role of a companion by giving rise to the fear of disapproval and to shame.
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As an element of self-training, writing has, to use an expression that one finds in Plutarch, an ethopoietic function: it is an agent of the transformation of truth into ethos.
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Hupomnemata, in the technical sense, could be account books, public registers, or individual notebooks serving as memory aids. Their use as books of life, as guides for conduct, seems to have become a common thing for a whole cultivated public. One wrote down quotes in them, extracts from books, examples, and actions that one had witnessed or read about, reflections or reasonings that one had heard or that had come to mind. They constituted a material record of things read, heard, or thought, thus offering them up as a kind of accumulated treasure for subsequent rereading and meditation. They also formed a raw material for the drafting of more systematic treatises, in which one presented arguments and means for struggling against some weakness (such as anger, envy, gossip, flattery) or for overcoming some difficult circumstance (a grief, an exile, ruin, disgrace). Thus, when Fundamus requests advice for struggling against the agitations of the soul, Plutarch at that moment does not really have the time to compose a treatise in the proper form, so he will send him, in their present state, the hupomnemata he had written himself on the theme of the tranquility of the soul; at least this is how he introduces the text of the Peri euthumias.
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The role of writing is to constitute, along with all that reading has constituted, a“body” (quicquid lectione collecturn est, stilus redigat in corpus ). And this body should be understood not as a body of doctrine but, rather —following an often evoked metaphor of digestion— as the very body of the one who, by transcribing his readings, has appropriated them and made their truth his own: writing transforms the thing seen or heard“into tissue and blood” (in vires etin sanguinem). It becomes a principle of rational action in the writer himself.

福柯有很多关于 "self-writing" 的言论，比较著名的是：

writing transforms the things seen or heard "into tissue and blood" (in vires et in sanguinem). It becomes a principle of rational action in the writer himself.
—— Ethics, P213, Michel Foucault

全书： https:// monoskop.org/images/0/0 0/Foucault_Michel_Ethics_Subjectivity_and_Truth.pdf