The goal of my work during the last 20 years or so has not been to analyse the phenomena of power, nor to elaborate the foundations of such an analysis. Instead, my objective has been to trace the history of the different ways by which, in modern culture, human beings are made subjects. Perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power. I am more and more interested in the interaction between oneself and others…in the modes of action that an individual exercises upon himself by means of the technologies of the self.

 How are we constituted as subjects of our own knowledge?  How are we constituted as subjects who exercise or submit to power relations?  How are we constituted as moral subjects of our own actions?

(a) the ethical substance, which is that part of oneself that is taken to be the relevant domain for ethical judgment; (b) the mode of subjection, which refers to the way in which the individual establishes his or her relation to moral obligations and rules; (c) the self-forming activity of ethical work, which is the work one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself into an ethical subject; (d), finally, the telos or the mode of being at which one aims in behaving ethically.

epimeleisthai sautou gnothi seauton techne tou biou

This pleasure, for which Seneca usually employs the word gaudium or laetitia, is a state that is neither accompanied nor followed by any form of disturbance in the body or the mind. It is defined by the fact of not being caused by anything that is independent of ourselves and therefore escapes our control. It arises out of ourselves and within ourselves.

We find it difficult to base rigorous morality and austere principles on the precept that we should give ourselves more care than anything else in the world. We are more inclined to see taking care of ourselves as an immorality, as a means of escape from all possible rules. We inherit the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically the way to self-renunciation.

“Stop feeling oneself as this phantastic ego!...Discover the errors of the ego!...Get beyond ‘me’ and ‘you’! Learn to feel (empfinden) cosmically!” (KSA 9)

Askesis means not renunciation but the progressive consideration of self or self-mastery, and this is secured not through the renunciation of reality but through the assimilation or incorporation of truth. Askesis has for its ultimate aim not preparation for another reality but access to the reality of this world. Aletheia is to become ethos. That is, askesis is a set of practices by which one can assimilate and transform truth into a permanent principle of action. The principal features of askesis include ‘exercises’ in which subjects place themselves in situations in which their ability to confront events and employ the discourse they have learned can be put to the test and verified. As F asks: ‘Is this truth assimilated enough to become ethics so that we can behave as we must when an event presents itself?’ (p. 239)

It’s quite clear from Socrates to Seneca or Pliny, for instance, that they didn’t worry about the afterlife, what happened after death, or whether God exists or not. That was not really a great problem for them; the problem was: Which ‘tekhne’ do I have to use in order to live well as I ought to live? (Ethics p. 260).

What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life? (p. 261)

The Greeks problematized their freedom, and the freedom of the individual, as an ethical problem. But ethical in the sense in which the Greeks understood it: ethos was a way of being and behaviour. It was a mode of being for the subject, along with a certain way of acting, a way visible to others. A person’s ethos was evident in his clothing, appearance, gait, in the calm with which he responded to every event, and so on. For the Greeks, this was the concrete form of freedom; this was the way they problematized their freedom. A man possessed of a splendid ethos, who could be admired and put forward as an example, was someone who practised freedom in a certain way…But extensive work by the self on the self is required for this practice of freedom to take shape in an ethos that is good, beautiful, honourable, estimable, memorable, and exemplary (p. 286).

From Antiquity to Christianity, we pass from a morality that was essentially the search for a personal ethics to a morality as obedience to a system of rules. And if I was interested in Antiquity it was because, for a whole series of reasons, the idea of morality as obedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared. And to this absence of morality corresponds, must correspond, the search for an aesthetics of existence (PPC p. 49).

His ethics represent an attempt to seek ways of living and thinking that are transgressive in the extent to which, like a work of art, they are not simply the product of normalizing power. The target of these practices is…modes of normalization: the forms of power that produce forms of subjectivity (p. 167).

The normalizing society is a society in which the norm of discipline and the norm of regulation intersect along an orthogonal articulation. To say that power took possession of life in the nineteenth century, or to say that power at least takes life under its care….is to say that it has, thanks to the play of technologies of discipline on the one hand and technologies of regulation on the other, succeeded in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the biological, between body and population (Society must, p. 253).

It is a myth to believe that we will find our true or authentic self once we have left out or forgotten this and that. That way we pick ourselves apart in an infinite regression: instead, the task is to make ourselves, to shape a form from all the elements! The task is always that of a sculptor! A productive human being! Not through knowledge but through practice and an exemplar do we become ourselves! Knowledge has, at best, the value of a means!