File spoon-archives/foucault.archive/foucault_1996/96-07-06.052, message 209


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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