InfoTrac Web: Gen'l Reference Ctr (Magazine Index).

                                                                              
   Source:  The Nation, June 30, 1997 v264 n25 p25(4).
                                                                              
    Title:  The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: vol. 1, Ethics:
            Subjectivity and Truth._(book reviews)
   Author:  Richard Shusterman
                                                                              
 Subjects:  Books - Reviews
   People:  Foucault, Michel
            Rabinow, Paul
Rev Grade:  B
                                                                              
  Magazine Collection:  93B0129
Electronic Collection:  A19573667
                   RN:  A19573667
                                                                              

Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 The Nation Company Inc.

Edited by Paul Rabinow. New Press. 334 pp. $27.50.

At the time of his death from AIDS in June 1984, Michel Foucault was 57 years
old. But he was already a famous and controversial philosopher--even in the
English-speaking world, where most of his important research on sexuality and
the ethics of self-styling had not yet been translated. This later work now
commands a great deal of attention, partly through its association with
Foucault's advocacy of a gay ethic. The polemics such an ethic inspired (not
least among scholars uncertain how to appraise his avid fascination with
consensual sadomasochism) have kept Foucault in the academic headlines. But
they risk diverting interest from the different kind of philosophical inquiry
that first established his fame and remains his greatest influence. In showing
how systems of knowledge are shaped by political structures of power they in
turn serve to justify, Foucault provided stunning critiques of some of our
most respected sciences and eminent institutions of health, justice,
government and education.

Impressed with the rich political import of his work, many were disappointed
when Foucault turned toward the ethics of self-care. From the vast fresco of
grand social institutions and impersonal forms of scientific knowledge,
Foucault's philosophy seemed to shrink into the private sphere, courting a
frivolous narcissism through its celebration of aesthetic self-styling and the
pleasures of creative sex. Those who refused to choose between early and late
Foucault still faced the question of how to bring his different philosophies
together into a coherent picture.

Now comes the first substantial anthology of Foucault's ethics of self-care
and sexuality that convincingly links it to his critical analyses of knowledge
and power. Culled eclectically from the posthumous four-volume miscellany of
Dits et ecrits, Paul Rabinow's collection on Ethics exhibits Foucault's
development of thought and rich range of textual exercises. Beginning with his
1969 statement of purpose as a candidate for professor at the College de
France, the book contains Foucault's official summaries of his yearly courses
there, never before published in English. In contrast, the second part's
fifteen texts are more diverse (interviews, essays, lectures, a seminar
transcription, even an unused book preface), and almost all have appeared in
previous English anthologies of Foucault. Concentrating on his ethics of
self-care, this section highlights Foucault's interest in self-fashioning
through writing and sexual practices, including some of his most important
accounts of S/M. The first of three projected volumes based on Dits et ecrits,
Ethics will be followed in the next two years by collections (on Aesthetics,
Method, and Epistemology and on Power) whose contents will further demonstrate
Foucault's fascination with self-transformation through textual and somatic
disciplines. By turns scholarly and scandalous, coldly cynical and
passionately utopian, Foucault's disciplinary efforts may be fascinating, but
what is the philosophical point of all such exercise?

Though conventionally defined as a quest for knowledge, philosophy has had a
long tradition that subordinated cognitive ideals of truth and self-knowledge
to a higher, more comprehensive ethical aim of self-care. In Seneca,
Epictetus, Cicero and Montaigne, philosophers would echo Socrates' warning
that the zeal for seeking knowledge dangerously distracts us from applying the
knowledge most useful for the conduct of life.

Foucault describes how philosophers, from antiquity to modernity, developed
the practice of self-care through different literary genres: keeping notebooks
of useful thoughts and quotations, exchanging letters of self-disclosure and
advice between friends, composing texts of self-examination and confession,
drafting meditative and exploratory essays. Such writing of the self was not
just a way of discovering who one was but "an attempt at modifying one's way
of being" through "askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of
thought." The ancient dietary and sexual regimens that Foucault studied, like
his experiments with drugs and S/M, were somatic analogues of philosophy's
textual disciplines of exploratory self-fashioning for better self-care.

Philosophy's notion of self-care connotes improvement rather than mere
maintenance, but what kind of improvement? Two models that have been dominant
since antiquity find expression in Foucault. The first is therapeutic,
analogous to medicine. As the physician cares for the body's health, so the
philosopher seeks to improve the soul's. While the physician faces inevitable
defeat in the body's death and decay, the philosopher can remain triumphant in
the health of the soul, conceived as immortal. Revived for today's scholarly
circles by Pierre Hadot, this medico-therapeutic model thrives more robustly
in the popular literature of self-help.

In contrast (though not necessarily in conflict) with the medico-therapeutic
ideal, ancient philosophy also offered an aesthetic model of self-care. Greek
philosophy drew many of its founding orientations from poetry and the arts,
even if it polemically turned to insist on its own superiority. Praising
love's desire for beauty as the source of philosophy, Plato's Symposium
celebrates the philosophical life as a continuous quest for ennobling beauty
through which one can achieve a kind of immortality by leaving beautiful
memorials in words and deeds. This is the aesthetic model that Foucault
champions as his ethics of self-care, "a kind of ethics which was an
aesthetics of existence," directed by "the will to live a beautiful life, and
to leave to others memories of a beautiful existence." Foucault traces this
idea of aesthetic self-fashioning from ancient philosophy through various
Christian transfigurations and into its most striking modern form, the
Baudelairian dandy, who makes his life a work of art.

While the medico-therapeutic model implies an essential norm of health,
Foucault's aesthetic model of self-care shares two tenets of pragmatist
anti-essentialism. The self has no fixed essence that defines its aesthetic
care; and art has no essence that confines it to the art world's fetishized
objects. "From the idea that the self is not given to us," Foucault argues, "I
think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create
ourselves as a work of art." And: "Why should the lamp or the house be an art
object but not our life?"

Even if we agree to see self-care as aesthetic, debate will erupt because of
the very different values with which art has been identified--unity,
harmonious form, pleasure, novelty, uniqueness. Which, then, should be given
preference in the aesthetic fashioning of our lives? If the Greeks stressed
the first two, Foucault seems to prefer novelty and uniqueness, not simply
through his critique of unity but by his celebration of avant-garde dandyism
and gay S/M for the "invention" of entirely "new lifestyles." If ancient lives
and artworks could satisfy by being creative variations on conventional
models, Foucault's Modernist aesthetic is perhaps excessive in demanding
something so radically new as to be "still improbable" and "unforesee[able]."

Sharing the ancients' respect for pleasure, Foucault offers a refreshing
alternative to the puritanical cognitive fixations that today dominate even
the discourse of art, though he insists that knowledge also gives pleasure and
that joy exacts its own demanding discipline. But in hedonism as in
aesthetics, Foucault's taste too exclusively tends toward the radical,
transgressive and spectacular. Rejecting what he calls "those middle-range
pleasures that make up everyday life" (dismissed as the American "club
sandwich," "Coke" and "ice cream," or the good "glass of wine"), Foucault
insists that "a pleasure must be something incredibly intense" or it is
"nothing": "the real pleasure would be so deep, so intense, so overwhelming
that I couldn't survive it. I would die." In championing strong drugs, S/M and
even suicide as the best means for such limit-experiences, Foucault projects a
sensationalist aura of transgression that can obscure the deep seriousness and
traditionalism of linking philosophy's arts of living and dying. Even before
Socrates defined philosophy in terms of both these (perhaps inseparable) arts,
Solon's dictum "Call no man happy until he is dead" argued that death's final
act could ruin the harmony, meaning and beauty of the whole life it ended.

But even if historically grounded, isn't Foucault's ethics of aesthetic
self-fashioning vitiated by his preferred practices of pleasure? Different
strokes for different folks affirms a vernacular wisdom apt for more than
S/M's disciples. One merit of the aesthetic model is that it prescribes no
rigid rules or perfect character to conform to, even when urging us all to
make our selves more attractive. It realizes not only that each self has its
own particular contingencies, talents and taste in self-fashioning but that
the very diversity of lifestyles provides its own aesthetic pleasure.

Foucault's "ethics of pleasure" is most usefully criticized neither for its
transgressive methods nor for its hedonism per se but for its failure to
recognize the full spectrum of pleasure, both in theory and in practice.
Charged by Hadot with confusing sensual voluptas with spiritual joy, Foucault
certainly provides no comparative analysis of pleasure's different forms and
values from titillation to bliss, pleasantness to rapture. His exclusionary
emphasis on the spectacularly intense and transgressive betrays his explicit
goal of making "ourselves infinitely more susceptible to pleasure" by reducing
pleasure's range and variety. The same sort of contradiction haunts his
celebration of gay S/M. Praised for desexualizing pleasure by displacing the
genital focus, it is contrastingly advocated for its intensifying
concentration on "the sexual act" (rather than the pleasures of courtship) and
for using "every part of the body as a sexual instrument"--hardly a promising
recipe for desexualization.

Foucault's aesthetic model of ethics is too rich and problematic to capture in
a brief review of largely occasional pieces. Its strengths and failings are
best seen in the context of his full corpus and of rival models (aesthetic or
otherwise) for practicing philosophy as an ethics of self-care. But this
anthology provides a fine introduction to this wider context. Rabinow's choice
and ordering of texts deftly shows how Foucault's ethical notion of aesthetic
self-care logically emerges from his major social, political and
epistemological theories, theories that have inspired forms of oppositional
politics from prison reform to lesbian liberation.

For Foucault, ethical self-care is structured by the systems of knowledge and
relations of power in which the self is situated. The extensive genealogical
studies of his earlier work show how our sciences relating to disease, madness
and criminality were shaped by institutional powers seeking to govern
populations. Within this context of sociopolitical government through systems
of knowledge emerges the distinctly ethical problem of self-government. The
College de France course summaries start from the most general questions of
knowledge and power before turning to specific historical inquiries with
respect to the penal, medical and mental health systems and their production
of truth. A short account of liberalism as a strategy of better social rule
through minimal state government provides the logical transition to the
individual's ethics of self-government, defined as self-care and construed
ultimately in aesthetic terms.

Can placing Foucault's aesthetic self-fashioning in this wider context
adequately respond to charges of narcissistic selfishness and apolitical
self-absorption? If the self is a product of repressively normalizing systems
of "power-knowledge," then its aesthetic refashioning into something radically
novel and nonconformist may be a useful act of resistance. But are the dandy
and the druggie today's best hopes for political reform? Could group suicide
prove even more effective and fun? Pragmatists like John Dewey have urged
different ways to linkpolitics with aesthetic self-care, emphasizing the
enrichment of the self that comes from caring for others through participatory
democratic praxis. While not excluding these good old altruistic strategies of
self-fashioning, Foucault's alternatives usefully problematize them; and
problematization rather than smug solution is the fruitful banner of his
philosophy.

Richard Shusterman, professor of philosophy at Temple University and the
College International de Philosophie, Paris, is the author of Pragmatist
Aesthetics (Blackwell) and Practicing Philosophy, just out from Routledge.
                                                                              
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