Saint Foucault
As someone who is writing a dissertation on the ethical dimensions of queer life (particularly among those who are "queered" by and through discourses other than simply that of the 'sexual') I've stumbled across all kinds of scholarly "quotable quotes" in the past few months (thanks in large part to essays by Foucault, Derrida, Montaigne, and many others) that have resonated with me in a particular kind of way.
Here's one I've been chewing on--comments offered by Foucault in an important interview conducted at Berkeley in 1983 that famously went on to be titled "On the Genealogy of Ethics." As someone who is deeply interested in the aesthetics of everyday life, in the relationship between artistic practice and everyday minoritarian existence, I couldn't help but smile and nod approvingly at the following assertion:
"What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life?"
I like your blog.
Posted by
Anonymous |
3/28/2008
Couldn't agree with you more.
Posted by
Anonymous |
3/30/2008
Hey Frank, this is basically a reiteration of Walter Pater's formulation in the remarkable final chapter of "The Renaissance: Studies in Renaissance Art and Literature" (1873), which was taken up and performed/embodied by his student, Oscar Wilde and others, and formed the ground of the aestheticist movement in Britain and the US. Pater theorizes what others, like Baudelaire, Whitman, etc., had been practicing. It links to dandyism, turn-of-the century bohemianism, and other forms of self-conscious aesthetic self-fashioning, and prefigures conceptual and performance art (and Nietzsche, Heidegger, the Situationists, the Fluxus movement, Conceptual and Performance art, etc.), by 100 years. Foucault's intervention involves a focus on the ethical dimension; he even practiced it (and askesis, etc.) in his political activism, his visits to leatherclubs and participation in BDSM, his public persona as a "gay man" (he uttered the famous phrase, "We must be relentlessly gay"), and so on. Anyways, the idea has a long provenance.
Posted by
John K |
4/03/2008