From: "Samuel A. Chambers" <Samuel.A.Chambers-1-AT-tc.umn.edu> Subject: Re: what is bio-power Date: Sun, 30 Jun 96 22:07:38 -0500 Following up on "the question of style" (and no doubt, in a discussion of Nietzsche and Foucault, Derrida must eventually intervene at some point), I thought a few passages from Halperin's recent book, "Saint Foucault," might be appropriate. Halperin writes: It may be tempting to see in Foucault's delineation of an aesthetic or stylistic mode of ethical practice in general, and in his valuation of lesbian and gay styles of lie in particular, a mere recapitulation of the much-execrated fin-de-siecle aestheticism typcially associated with Oscar Wilde--or a revival more specifically, of the "dandyism" championed by Baudelaire... But it would be a political mistake as well as an exegetical error to treat Foucault's ethical aestheticism recutively, or to underestimate the radical possibilities contained in all these varieties of ethical stylistics. ...Foucault in effect seizes on the most abjectedand devalued feature of gay male self-fashioning, namely, STYLE and finds in it a rigorous, austere, and transformative technology of the self which produces concrete possibilities for the development of personal autonomy. Ultimately, what sets Foucault;s own stylistics of the self apart from a reductively construed notion of "decadent style," and what allows the self to become a genuinely new strategic possibility, not merely an outmoded Romantic one, is the thoroughly IMPERSONAL conception of "the self" on which Foucault's entire model of stylistics rests. ...[and he goes on to explain this last sentence as follows] ...according to Foucault's conception, "the self" which is to be cultivated by means of an "art of life" (whether in the ancient world or in the modern) is not a personal IDENTITY so much as it is a RELATION OF REFLEXIVITY, a relation of the human subject to itself in its power and its freedom. Foucault's "self" is not an Emorsonian "self": it is not a personal substance or essence but, exactly as Veyne emphasizes, a strategic possibility. ...To practice a stylistics of the self ultimately means to cultivate that part of oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends oneself: it is to elaborate the strategic possibilities of what is the most IMPERSONAL dimension of personal life--namely, the capacity to "realize onself" by becoming other than what one is.[and, to me at least, this last sentence sounds strikingly like a sophisticated gloss on Nietzschean self-overcoming](pp73-76.) By elaborating on the potentialities of resistance located within Foucault's turn to "aesthetics"--and especially to ascesis as an ethical alternative to juridical codes of behavior--Halperin also links up the early and late Foucault (though not in any simple, linear way). Sam Chambers University of Minnesota
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