Abstract:
What happened during the fairly long silence following The History
of Sexuality? … had he [Foucault] not trapped himself within the concept
of power relations?’ asks Deleuze. According to him, Foucault
would have answered ‘that power does not take life as its objective
without revealing or giving rise to a life that resists power’ (Deleuze
1988: 94). The object of this essay is to assess what happens ‘if the
transversal relations of resistance continue to become restratified’.
When the long silence was finally broken, Foucault proposed a more
affirmative – aesthetic – mode of countering power, but what exactly
is the contemporary pertinence of the late Foucault’s insistence that
an aesthetics of existence provides us with the means to resist an
over-determination by power. This essay follows the trajectory of
Foucault’s turn to aesthetics: from care of the self as a reaction
against constraining governmental regulations and institutionalised
normalisations; to self-(trans)formation as a more affirmative strategy;
to the present day in which cultural capitalism has usurped all
aesthetic strategies of resistance. The essay therefore questions the
potentially subversive status of self-creation in the light of the fact
that contemporary governmental rationalities encourage self-stylising
individuality, alternative life-style choices and original ways of being
different. It concludes by arguing in favour of its continued relevance.
