ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out to show that the analyses of visual art, as significant as they are, do not exhaust Foucault’s interest on art and aesthetics. Most notably, evidence can be found in Foucault’s many discussions with French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez, whom he had met originally in the 1950s. Foucault himself does not explicitly relate these discussions on art/aesthetics and his political thinking, especially on governmentality and biopolitics as well as resistance, notwithstanding their overlap in his intellectual biography. The chapter excavates the core intersections between the domains of aesthetics on one hand, and politics on the other hand in the later 1970s and early 1980s Foucault. Foucault’s thinking also parts ways with the Austro-German German Romantic tradition of aesthetics in some essential ways.
