Life politics and aesthetics of existence in Michel Foucault

Abstract

During the last years of his life, Foucault focused on an ethics of the self tracing the relations between subject and truth in classical Greek and Roman Antiquity, presented as an “aesthetics of existence”. This is a turning point in Foucault’s work, which moves towards subjectivation, i.e. the processes through which the subject constitutes itself through a relation of the self to itself. We will approach this issue on the basis of the concept of bios, a pivotal point in his studies about biopower and his new work on tekhne tou biou or the art of living, which includes the study of the techniques of the self. For this purpose, it is necessary to understand the changes introduced by Foucault in the second volume of The History of Sexuality. This conceptual and methodological shift, far from being an aesthetic response to the issue of the subject, is a way of responding to Foucault’s political concerns about the present. From this last part, we outlined a possible analysis of the ways in which the moral subject is constituted in contemporary life.