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The Passion and the Pleasure Foucault's Art of Not Being Oneself

This article interprets Foucault's life-long involvement with transgressive experiences as an art of not being oneself, an effort to escape identity and become other. By bringing together Foucault's own theoretical practices with those drawn from Deleuze and Blanchot, and linking these with biographical material (modes of existence), I show how Foucault's `encounters' with passion and pleasure in film, philosophy, S/M, drugs, the Greeks and suicide amount to an `art of living', an intensification of the power to affect oneself and others in processes of `subjectivation', creating new possibilities of life. This is what Foucault more precisely called an `ethics' - an immanent ethics in which one becomes worthy of what happens to oneself by becoming a work of art.

Key Words: aesthetics • becoming • body • ethics • subjectivity

Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 20, No. 2, 119-144 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0263276403020002008


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