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Towards the end of his life, Foucault made a decisive ethical turn — a turn towards the self and seemingly away from his previous preoccupations which were considered more politically engaged. It appeared as if Foucault had trapped himself in power¹ and now chose to withdraw into the self.² Foucault even insisted that it was not power but the subject that formed the general theme of his research.³ And yet, his peculiar conception of power not only paved the way for but also appeared to necessitate a (re)turn to the self in his later works. A reconceptualized self appeared on the scene: exit self, the product; enter self, the creator. The self is now no longer considered as the passive product of an external system of constraint and prescriptions, but as the active agent of its own formation. Foucault unlocks the self's potential for liberty by returning to ancient Greek and Greco-Roman culture where the hermeneutics of the self was constituted by the practice of "care of the self." There he discovers an aesthetics of existence that is also ethical to the extent to which it maintains the freedom of the subject.⁴ In short, the later Foucault appears to be saying that we can be freer by creating ourselves anew.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137472427_8

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