“Soucie-toi de toi-même”: Michel Foucault and Etho-Poetics

Abstract

In view of the discussion in the previous chapter, the question inevitably arises as to how Michel Foucault understands the relation between the private and the public realm. The two books published shortly before his death, L’Usage des plaisirs and Le Souci de soi (both in 1984), are particularly valuable in this context. As far as I can see, Rorty never discussed these later texts in his writings. The notion of self-creation was of the utmost importance for the later Foucault. In “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress,” an interview with Paul Rabinow and Hubert Dreyfus, he calls attention to the fact that the arts of existence seem no longer to play any role in today’s society. In a by now famous statement he formulates this as follows:

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? (1983: 261)