From "the Face on the Sand" to "Ethics of the Self"

Michel Foucault is one of the most remarkable and important figures of the 20th century. Foucault's early oeuvre is, to certain extent, oriented toward breaking down the domination of a fully self-reflective, unified and rational subject at the centre of thought. Foucault maintains that subject has become the slave to the cage of material world and power relations and deeply trapped in the grid of power/knowledge which leads to the famous claim of ¿the Death of the man¿. However, in his final years, Foucault complements his passive, austere, detached vocabularies of ¿strategies¿ and ¿technologies¿ with the graceful and freedom-inspiring idea of an ¿ethics of the self¿ or ¿aesthetics of existence¿, where the main concern is to give one¿s life a self-determined, aesthetic appeal, and unique style. Foucault¿s ethics is an invitation to a practice of liberty, struggle and transgression, which seeks to open possibilities for new relations to self and events in the world. By understanding how a structure of social constraint has been constructed, one can understand how to escape the instrumental rationality or utilitarian logic that structures contemporary social experience.