Speak about Oneself: Between Aesthetics and Ethics in Michel Foucault

Abstract

This paper intends to analyze the possible relations between writing, literature and the Self throughout the works of Michel Foucault. To do so, we begin with a commentary on Maurice Blanchot’s “The daily journal and the narrative”, from The Book to Come, that provides the paradigm according to which Foucault understands these relations in the 1960s. The French philosopher inherits from Blanchot a conception of literature as an instance where the Self disappears. This paradigm will change when, turning to his genealogic phase during the 1970s, Foucault will conceive all literature as linked to the exercise of power: no longer able to unearth a potency that negates all sovereignty, literature becomes another discourse that fabricates a governable and docile interiority by forcing a subject to talk about himself. Finally, in the 1980s, Foucault returns to an affirmative consideration of literature and art. In line with the privilege of ethics – evident in this phase of his work –, this return to aesthetics will be marked by an understanding of art that innovatively considers it less a form of creating works than a place to invent oneself.