The “Aesthetics of Existence” in the Last Foucault: Art as a Model of Self-Invention

Abstract

Abstract:This article discusses the “aesthetics of existence” developed by Foucault in the late “ethical” stage of his work, aiming to clarify its complex significance through its relationships with ethics, critique, and, in particular, art as a model of self-invention. The main claims are that aesthetics of existence is a new type of self-formation molded by technologies inspired not only by the ancient ethical self-formation but also by modern art understood as creative self-production; thus, aesthetics of existence is an active form of aesthetic education, in the particular sense of an ontological self-formation. To argue these claims, the author advances a line of analysis alternative to typical readings, which see it as related exclusively to the ancient “art of living” or its modern revival in the Nietzschean project of self-fashioning. The focus is instead on the Baudelairean and Kantian roots of Foucault’s work—modernity as a critical attitude and the transgressive art of the self of the dandy—as keys to understand the reframing by him of the art of living into a modern aesthetics of existence. This appears as a critical-transgressive invention of the self, which could contribute to constituting new subjectivities and alternative norms for the entire social body.