The self as a work of art. Shusterman, Richard. Nation , jun1997, Vol. 264 Issue 25, p25 28

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Tune 30.1997 The Nation. 25 
The Self As a Work of Art 
RICHARD SHUSTERMAN 
bring his different philosophies together 
into a coherent picture. 
Now comes the first substantial anthol- 
ogy of Foucault’s ethics of self-care and 
sexuality that convincingly links it to his 
critical analyses of knowledge and power. 
THE ESSENTIAL WORKS OF MICHEL 
FOUCAULT, 1954-1984 Yol. 1. Ethics: 
Subjectivity and Truth. 
Edited by Paul Rabinow. 
New Press. 334 pp. $27.50. 
t the time of his death froi .% AIDS in 
June €984, Michel Foucault was 57 
years old. But he was already a famous 
and controversial philosopher-even A in the English-speaking world, where 
most of his important research on sexual- 
ity 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 ad- 
vocacy of a gay ethic. The polemics such 
an ethic inspired (not least among scholars 
uncertain how to appraise his avid fascina- 
tion with consensual sadomasochism) have 
kept Foucault in the academic headlines. 
But they risk diverting interest from the 
different kind ofDhilosophica1 inauirvthat Foucault’s taste to0 eXCt!USiVe& tends toward 
Culled eclectically from the posthumous 
four-volume miscellany of Dits et kcrits, 
Paul Rabinow’s collection on Ethics ex- 
hibits Fo~caul t~s development of thought 
and rich range of textual exercises. Begin- 
ning with his 1969 statement ofpurpose as 
a candidate for professor at the Collbge de 
France, the book contains Foucault’s offi- 
cial summaries of his yearly courses there, 
never before published in English. In con- 
trasty the secondpart’s fifteen texts are more 
diverse (interviews, essays, lectures, a sem- 
inar transcription, even an unused book 
preface), and ahos t all have appeared in 
Rejecting all ‘m iddle-ra nge pleasures,’ 
first established his fame and rema& his 
greatest influence. showing how systeins 
of knowledge are shapedbypolitical struc- 
tures 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, gov- 
ernment and education. 
Impressed with the rich political im- 
port of his work, many were disappointed 
when Foucault turned toward the ethics of 
self-care. From the vast fresco of grand so- 
cial institutions and impersonal forms of 
scientific knowledge, Foucault’s philoso- 
phy 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 
Richard Shusternzan, professor of philosophy 
at Temple University and the Collsge Inter- 
national de Philosophie, Paris, is the author of 
Pragmatist Aesthetics (BlackwelE) and Practic- 
ing Philosophy, just out from Routledge. 
the radical, transgressive and spectacular. 
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 im- 
portant accounts of S N . The first of three 
projected volumes based on Dits et kcrits, 
Ethics will be followed in the next two 
years by collections (on Aesthetics, Method, 
and Episteinology and on Power) whose 
contents will further demonstrate Fou- 
cault’s fascination with self-transformation 
through textual and somatic disciplines. 
By turns scholarly and scandalous, coldly 
cynical and passionately utopian, Fou- 
cault’s disciplinary efforts may be fasci- 
nating, but what is thephilosophical 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 
26 The Nation. June 30,1997 
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rates’ warning that the zeal for seeking 
knowledge dangerously distracts us from 
applying the knowledge most useful for 
the conduct of life. 
oucault describes how philosophers, 
from antiquity to modernity, developed 
the practice of self-care through differ- 
ent literary genres: keeping notebooks 
of useful thoughts and quotations, ex- 
changing letters of self-disclosure and ad- 
vice 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 ac- 
tivity 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 con- 
notes improvement rather than mere main- 
tenance, 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 popu- 
lar literature of self-help. 
In contrast (though not necessarily in 
conflict) with the medico-therapeutic ideal, 
ancient philosophy also offered ‘an aes- 
thetic model of self-care. Greekphilosophy 
drew many of its founding orientations 
from poetry and the arts, even if it polem- 
ically turned to insist on its own superior- 
ity. Praising love’s desire for beauty as the 
source of philosophy, Plato’s Symposium 
celebrates the philosophical life as a con- 
tinuous quest for ennobling beauty through 
which one can achieve a kind of b o r - 
tality 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 existen~e,~’ 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 trans- 
figurations and into its most striking mod- 
ern form, the Baudelairian dandy, who 
makes his life a work of art. 
While the medico-therapeutic model 
implies an essential norm of health, Fou- 
cault’s aesthetic model of self-care shares 
two tenets of pragmatist anti-essentialism. 
The self has no fixed essence that defies 
its aesthetic care; and art has no essence 
that confiies 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 hasbeen identified-unity, harmonious form, 
pleasure, novelty, uniqueness. Which, then, 
should be given preference in the aesthet- 
ic fashionjng 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 cel- 
ebration 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 cWoresee[able].yy 
haring 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 exclu- 
sively tends toward the radical, transgres- 
sive 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 “noth- 
ing”: ‘‘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, Fou- 
cault projects a sensationalist aura of trans- 
gression that can obscure the deep serious- 
ness and traditionalism of linking philos- 
ophy’s arts of living and dying. Even be- 
fore Socrates defined philosophy in terms 
of both these (perhaps inseparable) arts, 
Solon’s dictum “Call no man happy until 
- 
June 30,1997 The Nation. 27 
he is dead” argued that death’s fmal 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 prac- 
tices .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 pre- 
sciibes no rigid rules or perfect character 
to conform to, even when urging us all to 
make our selves more attractive. It real- 
izes not only that each self has its own 
particular contingencies, talents and taste 
in self-fashioning but that the very diver- 
sity of lifestyles provides its own aesthetic 
pleasure. 
oucault’s “ethics of pleasure” is most 
usefully criticized neither for its trans- 
gressive methods nor for its hedonism 
per se but for its failure to recognize f the full spectrum of pleasure, both in 
theory and in practice. Charged by Hadot 
with confusing sensual vooluptas with spir- 
itual joy, Foucault certainly provides no 
comparative analysis of pleasure’s differ- 
ent forms andvalues 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 suscep- 
tible to pleasure” by reducing pleasure’s 
range and variety. The same sort of con- 
tradiction haunts his celebration of gay 
S/M. Praised for desexualizing pleasure 
by displacing the genital focus, it is con- 
trastingly advocated for its intensifling 
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 prac- 
ticing philosophy as an ethics of self-care. 
But this anthology provides a fine intro- 
duction 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 theo- 
ries, theories that have inspired forms of 
oppositional politics from prison reform 
to lesbian liberation. 
For Foucault, ethical self-care is struc- 
tured by the systems of knowledge and 
relations of power in which the self is situ- 
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28 The Nation. Tune 30.1997 
ated. The extensive genealogical studies of 
his earlier work show how our sciences re- 
lating to disease, madness and criminality 
were shaped by institutional powers seek- 
ing to govem populations. Within this con- 
text of sociopolitical government through 
systems of knowledge emerges the dis- 
tinctly 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 sys- 
tems and their production of truth. A short 
account of liberalism as a strategy of better 
social rule through minimal state govem- 
ment provides the logical transition to the 
individual’s ethics of self-government, de- 
fined as self-care and construed ultimately 
in aesthetic terms. 
Can placing Foucault’s aesthetic self- 
fashioning in this wider context adequate- 
ly respond to charges of narcissistic self- 
ishness and apolitical self-absorption? If 
the self is aproduct ofrepressively normal- 
izing systems of “power-knowledge,” then 
its aesthetic refashioning into something 
radically novel and nonconformist may beauseful act bfresistance. But are the dandy 
and the druggie today’s best hopes for po- 
litical reform? Could group suicide prove 
even more effective and fun? Pragmatists 
like John Dewey have urged different ways 
to linkpolitics with aesthetic self-care, em- 
phasizing the enrichment of the self that 
comes from caring for others through par- 
ticipatory democratic praxis. While not ex- 
cluding these good,old altruistic strategies 
of self-fashioning, Foucault’s altematives 
usefully problematize them; and problema- 
tization rather than smug solution is the 
fruitful banner of his philosophy. w 
unnies From Hell 
DAVID KIRBY 
THE LAST PARTY: Scenes From My Life With Norman Moiler. 
By Adele Mailer. Barricade. 377 pp. $25. 
hey float out of the darkness at the edge of our dreams, their faces bloody, 
their lungs full, their mouths bricked shut with the mortar of time. They are 
Elizabeth MelviIle and Joan Burroughs, but they are also Mary Jo Kopechne 
and, if the civil-trial jury is right and the criminal-trial jury wrong, Nicole 
Simpson. Who speaks for these women 
who’ve been shoved, shot, slashed, left to 
die? Adele Mailer does,: in a book that be- 
gins as a fever dream, then turns into a talk- 
show episode titled “Women Who Love 
Too Much and the Men Who Stab Them!” 
The fact that the author survived the two 
knife wounds inflicted on her by Norman 
Mailer in the early hours of November 20, 
1962, allows a certain irreverence on the 
reader’s part, not toward the celebrated 
novelist’s viciousness but toward his ex- 
wife’s spacey account of their life together. 
The Last Party is much more than what 
Adele, the second of Mailer’s six wives, 
calls “my trip into the light fantastic with 
anice Jewish boy genius; newly famous and 
rich, my fatal attraction.” That last phrase 
hints at what is to come, narratively and 
stylistically, for the story itself is altemate- 
ly horrendous and hilarious-the horror 
David Kirby is the W. Guy McKenzie Profes- 
sor ofEnglish at Florida State University. His 
latest book is a collection of p o e w , Big-Leg 
Music (Orchises). 
stemming from the descriptions of Nor- 
man’s behavior and the unwitting hilarity 
from Adele’s overheated style. . 
Self-flattery and clichks appear on al- 
most every page, often together (“I remem- 
ber how vital we all were, interestedpartic- 
ipants in the life around us, in the urgency 
of the moment”). Inappropriate metaphors 
abound (“I had orgasm after orgasm, but 
I gave nothing from deep inside. We were 
well matched, Steve and me, two desper- 
adoes riding out the night”), as do out-and- 
out howlers (“I was shy and unsure of my- 
self, so I rarely expressed my own ideas. 
That is, when I had them”). There are the 
musipgs that were probably never mused 
(“So, this is the famous writer. God, I’m 
embarrassed, I never read his book. He’s 
so skinny, but look at that hair, it has a life 
of its own, like Samson and maybe I’m 
his Delilah”) and the remarks that likely 
were never remarked (when Norman com- 
plains about how much garlic Adele uses, 
she tells him, “You’re like Marcel Proust, 
always sniffing things”). 
Pot, bennies, booze, backhands to the 
chops, sex in twos and threes and fours: 
This book has everything except irony. 
In part, The Last Party is a description of 
bohemianNew York culture in the fifties, 
but it reads less like Minor Characters, 
Joyce Johnson’s understated memoir of 
the Kerouac-Ginsberg crowd, than like that 
classic kitsch tell-all, Big Love, Florence 
Aadland’s account of her teenage daugh- 
ter’s affair with Errol Flynn, the standard 
for glitzy artlessness. 
o why would a serious reader keep 
tuming the pages of The Last Party? 
Simple: It’s an insider’s look at a mur- 
der that almost happened. Most wom- 
en who go down the path that Adele 
Mailer took don’t come back, and those 
who do are usually pressured into silence 
by lawyers, relatives, their would-be killers, 
themselves. Adele is there at the begin- 
ning, but she’s still there at the end, and 
hers is a persuasive account despite all 
those freshman-comp gaffes-indeed, the 
nayvet6 of the prose convinces you that 
she can’t be making this stuff up. Be- 
tween the mention of “the stabbing” on 
the book’s first page and its actual occur- 
rence nearly 350 pages later, she gives the 
reader a visceral sense of how easy it is to 
love and keep loving a charmer with a 
knife in his hand. 
The charm comes first, of course, with 
a friend phoning up at 2 A.M. on a winter 
moming and introducing Norman, who 
reads a passage from The Last Tycoon so 
seductively that Adele gets dressed (cream- 
colored silk blouse, black velveteen skirt, 
flowered chiffon scarf, silver hoop earrings) 
and catches a cab. Soon they’re in bed, 
where Norman proves that his verbal talent 
is not limited to the page: “‘Talk dirty to 
me, darling,’ I would whisper in the throes, 
and I would hear pomographic prose, cllrty 
enough for my lust and literary enough for 
my finer senses.’’ He corrects her French 
(“Mousse, not moussay, darling”) and even 
teaches her to ski. Alas, Adele sighs, “life 
Oh, but it is. Life is all peaks and valleys 
in The Last Party, with so many plunges 
over cliffs and collisions with trees that, 
after a while, catastrophe becomes the 
norm. No mass of men leading lives of’ 
quiet desperation here: Instead, there are 
infidelities, counter-infidelities and spit-in- 
your-face arguments. Love on the rocks is 
the house drink at the Mailer ski lodge, and 
the more alcohol-well, the more alcohol. 
Nobody sleeps much: It’s drink and screw 
and brawl all night long. On and on they 
go, like Energizer bunnies from Hell, from 
the Village to Provincetown to Mexico, 
j 
is no ski tip.” I