Technologies of the Self, Politics, and Resistance: Michel Foucault and the Possibility of New Subjectivities

Abstract

We propose to analyze the technologies of the self within the general framework of a politics of existence. It is about thinking about how the work of the subjects on themselves represents a way of turning their life into a beautiful object, into a true work of art, turning the subject into a tekhnites, an artisan, who models his life according to what beautiful and good.

 We will go through the Foucaultian corpus, highlighting a certain aesthetic dimension in the subjective configuration, investigating how this conformation implies forms and modalities of the relationship with oneself, inaugurating a true culture of the self, an epimeleia heautou, which has a strong role in the Greek world.

In summary, Foucault's attempt is to recover an autonomous dimension of the subject, outside of any coercive relationship, moving through a new model of subjectivation, privileging self-invention and self-determination, as forms of resistance, above technological fiction.