>mode of ethical practice in general, and in his valuation of lesbian and gay
>styles of lie in particular, a mere recapitulation of the much-execrated
>fin-de-siecle aestheticism typcially associated with Oscar Wilde--or a revival
>more specifically, of the "dandyism" championed by Baudelaire... But it would
>be a political mistake as well as an exegetical error to treat Foucault's
>ethical aestheticism recutively, or to underestimate the radical possibilities
>contained in all these varieties of ethical stylistics. ...Foucault in effect
>seizes on the most abjectedand devalued feature of gay male self-fashioning,
>namely, STYLE and finds in it a rigorous, austere, and transformative
>technology
Question 1: does anyone know what Foucault thought of the original
french version of the birdcage: just wondering?
To practice a stylistics of the self ultimately means to
>cultivate that part of oneself that leads beyond oneself, that transcends
>oneself: it is to elaborate the strategic possibilities of what is the most
>IMPERSONAL dimension of personal life--namely, the capacity to "realize
>onself"
>by becoming other than what one is.[and, to me at least, this last sentence
>sounds strikingly like a sophisticated gloss on Nietzschean
>self-overcoming](pp73-76.)
Question 2: can anyone tell me what this exactly means: how do I
mkae myself other than what I am? Is this a local struggle? Is this where
the intellectual cannot give any help?
Jeff