ABSTRACT
I happened, when working on an early draft of this chapter, to pass a beauty salon called, simply, Aesthetic. This served as a timely reminder of the fact that, beyond its modern specialist uses as, variously, the theory of the fine arts, the philosophy of taste or the science of the beautiful, ‘aesthetics’ is now also commonly used, as Raymond Williams puts it, ‘to refer to questions of visual appearance and effect’1-as, in this instance, to the cultivation and maintenance of such appearances. It is this sense of the term Foucault draws on in including aesthetics among the practices of the self he discusses in The History of Sexuality2-practices, he later tells us, which need to be understood as parts of ‘technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’.3
