Life in an extramoral sense. An essay on the care of the self as a politics of deindividualisation

Abstract

This article approaches Michel Foucault’s work on the bios –as part of his study of the care of the self in pagan asceticism– in the context of struggles against the government of individualisation. From this perspective, it is
argued that an ethics of the self, far from presenting itself as an individualistic way out, responds to a marginal history of the relations between subject and truth. The history of the bios was obscured by the history of the development
of the subject-soul, of a metaphysics of identity and of the individual as an effect of the government of individualisation. The aim is to bring together two genealogies. On the one hand, that of the ontology of the self and of the
docility of the body -coinciding with the development of the care of the self of the Platonic model of reminiscence and of the exegesis of the self of Christian asceticism- with a genealogy of morality that manifests the hostility of the
ascetic ideal towards life. In this sense, the rescue of the history of the bios manifests itself not only as a politics of deindividualisation; it reinstates,
at the same time, for our present, the paradox of the impossibility and the urgency of a contemporary ethics of the self.