> 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
>
I'm not actually sure that Foucault meant this sort of statement to
be a rigorously analytical one. If one takes a number of Foucault's
statements to the effect together ("Introduction to the Non-Fasist
Life," "What is Enlightenment?" "How Much Does It Cost for Reason to
Tell the Truth?"), I get something like this: Find out, through a
process of genealogy and archaology, what parts of your historical
being are invested in relationships (*not* structures) of power that
lead to intolerable acts. Through a creative means appropriate to
your powers and your history, stop being, doing, and thinking those
things.
///Connor
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E.M. Connor Durflinger Philosopher for Hire
"Have Forestructures, Will Travel"
Reverend, Universal Life Church
bc05319@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx PIC Program at B.U.
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