“intentional and voluntary actions” through which human beings fix canons of
behavior that serve a function that Foucault defines as “etho-poetic” (pp. 15–
17/10–13). What is in question is not an improbable genealogy of aesthetics but
a “new genealogy of morals” (Foucault 2, p. 731/Lotringer, p. 451). It is a matter
of reintroducing into ethics “the problem of the subject that I had more or less
left aside in my first studies . . . to show how the problem of the subject has not
ceased to exist throughout this question of sexuality” (ibid., p. 705/Lotringer,
p. 472). In fact, the care of the self for the Greeks is not an aesthetic problem; it
“is ethical in itself” (p. 714/Rabinow, p. 287).
6. Hadot did not hide his belated acquaintance with the work of Foucault
(“I must confess, with great shame, that, too absorbed in my own research, I
had very poor knowledge of his work then [1980],” Hadot 1, p. 230). This can
in part explain why the other “divergences” denounced by Hadot also seem to
rest on imprecise data. When he writes that “instead of speaking of a ‘cultivation
of the self,’ it would be better to speak of transformation, of transfiguration, of
‘overcoming the self ’” and that, to describe this state, “one cannot avoid the
term ‘wisdom,’ which, it seems to me, in Foucault appears rarely, if ever”; and
when he notes, finally, that “Foucault, who does do justice to the conception of
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philosophy as therapeutic, does not seem to notice that this therapeutic is above
all intended to procure peace of the soul,” each time and point by point it is a
matter of factual inexactitude. The index of the course on The Hermeneutics of
the Subject, which constituted, so to speak, the laboratory for the investigations on the care of the self, in fact shows that the term “wisdom” appears at least eighteen times, and the term “wise man” almost as many times. In the same course,
one reads that, in the ambit of the spirituality that Foucault intends to recon-
struct, “the truth enlightens the subject; the truth gives beatitude to the subject;
the truth gives the subject tranquility of the soul. In short, in the truth and in
access to the truth, there is something that fulfills the subject himself, which ful-
fills or transfigures his very being” (Foucault 1, p. 18/16). And just a little earlier,
Foucault writes that spirituality “postulates that for the subject to have right of
access to the truth he must be changed, transformed, shifted, and become, to
some extent and up to a certain point, other than himself” (ibid., p. 17/15).
7. The divergences do not concern the displacement of the aesthetic sphere
into the ethical or a simple difference in vocabulary so much as the very concep-
tion of ethics and the subject. Hadot does not succeed in detaching himself from
a conception of the subject as transcendent with respect to its life and actions,
and for this reason, he conceives the Foucauldian paradigm of life as work of
art according to the common representation of a subject-author who shapes
his work as an object external to him. And yet in a celebrated piece from 1969,
Foucault had intended to put precisely this conception into question. Reducing
the author to a juridical-social fiction, he suggested that we see in the work not
the expression of a subject anterior and external to it, but rather the opening of
a space into which the subject never stops vanishing, and identified indifference
with respect to the author as “one of the fundamental ethical principles of con-
temporary writing” (Foucault 4, p. 820/116). In this he was once again faithful to
the teaching of Nietzsche, who in an aphorism of 1885–86 (to which Heidegger
did not fail to call attention; qtd. in Heidegger 3, p. 222/180) had written: “The
artwork, where it appears without an artist, e.g., as body [ Leib], as organization (the Prussian officer corps [ preussisches Offizierkorps], the Jesuit order). To what extent the artist is only a preliminary stage. The world as an artwork that gives
birth to itself.” In the same sense, in the interview with Dreyfus and Rabinow,
Foucault specifies that speaking of life as a work of art implies precisely call-
ing into question the paradigm of the exclusive artist-creator of a work-object:
“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
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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?” (Foucault 2, p. 392/Rabinow, p. 261).
8. How, then, are we to understand this creation of one’s own life as a work
of art? The problem, for Foucault, is inseparable from his problematization of
the subject. The very idea of life as work of art derives from his conception of
a subject that can no longer be separated out into an originary constituent po-
sition. “I think,” he writes in the interview cited above, “that there is only one
practical consequence of the idea that the subject is not given in advance: we
have to create ourselves as a work of art. . . . [W]e should not have to refer the
creative activity of somebody to the kind of relation he has to himself, but should
relate the kind of relation one has to oneself to a creative activity” (Foucault 2,
pp. 392–393/Rabinow, p. 262). The relation with oneself, that is to say, constitu-
tively has the form of a creation of self, and there is no subject other than in this
process. For this reason Foucault breaks with the conception of the subject as
foundation or condition of possibility of experience. On the contrary: “experi-
ence is the rationalization of a process, itself provisional, which results in a subject, or rather in subjects” (Foucault 2, p. 706/Lotringer, p. 472). This means that properly there is not a subject but only a process of subjectivization: “I would
call subjectivization the process through which results the constitution of a sub-
ject” (ibid.). And again: “I don’t think there is actually a sovereign, founding
subject, a universal form of subject that one could find everywhere. . . . I think
on the contrary that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection,
or, in a more anonymous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom . . .”
(p. 733/Lotringer, p. 452).
9. It is clear that it is not possible here to distinguish between a constituent
subject and a constituted subject. There is only a subject that is never given in
advance, and the work to be constructed is the constructing subject itself. This
is the paradox of the care of the self that Hadot does not manage to understand
when he writes that “it is not a matter of the construction of a self, but on the
contrary, of an overcoming of the I.” “Self” for Foucault is not a substance nor
the objectifiable result of an operation (the relation with itself): it is the oper-
ation itself, the relation itself. That is to say, there is not a subject before the
relationship with itself and the use of the self: the subject is that relationship and
not one of its terms (cf. part I
, §3.2 above). In accordance with its essential per-
tinence to first philosophy, the subject implies an ontology, which, however, is
not, for Foucault, that of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon nor that of the Cartesian
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1119
subject. It is above all from this latter, probably following a suggestion from Hei-
degger, that Foucault takes his distance. The specific achievement of Descartes
is, in fact, that “he succeeded in substituting a subject as founder of practices of
knowledge for a subject constituted through practices of the self” (Foucault 2,
p. 410/Rabinow, p. 278).
10. The idea that ethics coincides not with the relation to a norm but first
of all with a “relationship with oneself” is constantly present in Foucault. It is
this and nothing else that he uncovered in his studies on the souci de soi in the
classical world: “Pour les Grecs, ce n’est pas parce qu’il est souci des autres qu’il
est éthique. Le souci de soi est éthique en lui-même” (“What makes it ethical for
the Greeks is not that it is care for others. The care of the self is ethical in itself”;
Foucault 2, p. 714/Rabinow, p. 287). Certainly every moral action entails “a re-
lation to the reality in which one is inscribed or to a code to which one refers”;
but it cannot be reduced to an act or to a series of acts in conformity to a rule,
because it implies in every case “a certain relationship with oneself” (Foucault 2,
p. 558). And this relationship, Foucault specifies, must not be understood simply
as an “awareness of oneself” but rather as the “constitution of the self as moral
subject” (ibid.). “It is the kind of relationship you ought to have with your-
self . . . which determines how the individual is supposed to constitute himself
as a moral subject of his own actions” (Foucault 2, p. 618/Rabinow, p. 263).
Ethics is, for Foucault, the relationship that one has with oneself when one acts
or enters into relation with others, constituting oneself each time as subject of
one’s own acts, whether these belong to the sexual sphere, the economic, the
political, the scientific, etc. Thus, what is in question in The History of Sexuality
is in no way a social or psychological history of sexual behaviors but the way in
which the human being comes to the point of constituting himself or herself as
a moral subject of his or her own sexual behaviors. And, in the same way, what
was able to interest him in the experiments of the homosexual communities of
San Francisco or New York was, once again, the relation with oneself that their
novelty entailed and the consequent constitution of a new ethical subject.
11. In the last course at the Collège de France, Le courage de la vérité ( The
Courage of Truth), concluded a few months before his death, Foucault evokes,
in connection with the Cynics, the theme of the philosophical life as true life
( alethes bios).
In the résumé of the 1981–82 course L’herméneutique du sujet, in which the
theme of the care of the self had been developed through a reading of Plato’s
Alcibiades, Foucault had written that “s’occuper de soi n’est pas une simple
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préparation momentanée à la vie; c’est une forme de vie” (“attending to the self
is not therefore just a brief preparation for life; it is a form of life”; Foucault 1,
p. 476/494). Now, in the paradigm of the philosophical life, he closely links the
themes of truth and of mode of life. Cynicism, he writes, had raised an impor-
tant question, which restores the radicality of the theme of the philosophical life:
“la vie, pour être vraiment la vie de la vérité, ne doit-elle pas être une vie autre,
une vie radicalement et paradoxalement autre?” (“for life truly to be the life of
truth, must it not be an other life, a life which is radically and paradoxically
other?”; Foucault 5, p. 226/245). That is to say, there are in the tradition of clas-
sical philosophy two different modalities of linking the practice of the self to the
courage of truth: the Platonic one, which privileges mathemata and knowledge,
and the cynical one, which instead gives to the practices of the self the form of
a test ( épreuve) and seeks the truth of being human not in a doctrine but in a
certain form of life, which by subverting the current models of society makes of
the bios philosophikos a challenge and a scandal (ibid., p. 243/265).
In the lineage of this Cynical model, Foucault also inscribes “militancy as
bearing witness by one’s life in the form of a style of existence” (Foucault 5,
p. 170/184) in the tradition of revolutionary movements up through gauchisme,
certainly very familiar to his generation. “La résurgence du gauchisme,” he writes,
using terms perhaps best fit to characterize Situationism, which is curiously
never mentioned in his writings, “comme tendance permanente à l’intérieur de
la pensée et du projet révolutionnaire européens, s’est toujours faite en prenant
appui non pas sur la dimension de l’organisation, mais sur cette dimension du
militantisme qui est la socialité secrète se manifestant et se rendant visible par des
formes de vie scandaleuses” (“the resurgence of leftism as a permanent tendency
within European revolutionary thought and projects has always taken place not
by basing itself on the organizational dimension but on the dimension of mili-
tantism comprising a secret sociality or style of life . . . which manifests itself and
makes itself visible in scandalous forms of life”; p. 171/185). Alongside this is the
paradigm of the artist in modernity, whose life, “in the very form it takes, should
constitute some kind of testimony of what art is in its truth” (p. 173/187).
In the analysis of the “theme of the life of the artist, so important throughout
the nineteenth century” (ibid.), Foucault again finds the proximity between art
and life and the idea of “an aesthetics of existence” that he had formulated in
L’usage des plaisirs. If, on the one hand, art confers to life the form of truth, on the other hand, the true life is the guarantee that the work that is rooted in it is
truly a work of art. In this way, life and art become indeterminate and art is pre-
sented as form of life at the very point where form of life appears as a work of art.
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In any case, in the bios of the philosopher as much as in that of the artist, the
practice of the self as constitution of an other form of life is the true theme of the
course, which in the manuscript closes with the affirmation, which can perhaps
be considered as a sort of last will and testament: “il ne peut y avoir de vérité que
dans la forme de l’autre monde et de la vie autre” (“there can be truth only in the
form of the other world and the other life”; p. 311/340).
12. To understand the peculiar ontological status of this subject that is con-
stituted through the practice of the self, it may be useful to draw an analogy
with a pair of categories drawn from the sphere of public law: constituent
power and constituted power. Here also the aporia, which has paralyzed the
theory of public law, arises from the separation
of the two terms. The tradi-
tional conception places at the origin a constituent power, which creates and
separates off from itself, in a ceaseless circularity, a constituted power. True con-
stituent power is not that which produces a constituted power separated from
itself, which refers back to constituent power as its unreachable foundation,
which, however, has no other legitimacy than that which derives from having
produced a constituted power. Constituent is, in truth, only that power—that
subject—that is capable of constituting itself as constituent. The practice of
the self is that operation in which the subject adequates itself to its own con-
stitutive relation and remains immanent to it: “the subject puts itself into play
in taking care of itself” (Foucault 1, p. 504/523). The subject, that is to say, is
what is at stake in the care of the self, and this care is nothing but the process
through which the subject constitutes itself. And ethics is not the experience
in which a subject holds itself behind, above, or beneath its own life but that
whose subject constitutes and transforms itself in indissoluble immanent rela-
tion to its life, by living its life.
13. But what does it mean to “constitute-oneself”? Here one has something
like the “self-constituting as visiting” or the “walking-oneself” with which Spi-
noza (cf. above, part I, §2.5) exemplifies the immanent cause. The identity of
active and passive corresponds to the ontology of immanence, to the move-
ment of autoconstitution and autopresentation of being, in which not only does
there fail every possibility of distinguishing between agent and patient, subject
and object, constituent and constituted, but in which even means and end, po-
tential and act, work and inoperativity are indeterminated. The practice of the
self, the Foucauldian ethical subject, is this immanence: being subject as self-
walking. The being that is constituted in the practice of the self never remains—
or should never remain—beneath or before itself, never separates—or should
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never separate—off from itself a subject or a “substance,” but remains immanent
to itself, is its constitution, and never stops self-constituting, self-exhibiting, and
The Omnibus Homo Sacer Page 173
