The fractured ‘older’ subject at the limits of ‘ageing’

The way in which the ‘older’ subject is ‘put into discourse’ (Foucault, 1976) in relation to cosmetic surgery is shaped by a normative system of inscription. This system comprises prevailing ‘regimens of truth’ (Foucault, 1990) that inscribe and problematize the ‘older’ subject in relation to an ethics of the self connected to ‘ageing’. This chapter establishes that these dominant regimens of truth are an outworking of a Cartesian ethics that cleaves the subject into the rational transcendental mind and the natural material body (Grosz, 1994). The problem of this ethics in relation to ‘ageing’, is one in which the subjective experience of ‘older’ is fractured by dissonance between the ‘ageing’ body and the ‘ageless’ transcendental self. The chapter begins by drawing on themes, amplified through excerpts of data, to elaborate the ways in which the dissonance between body and self is articulated in the textual data and the extant literature on ‘ageing’. To analyse how the self and body are rendered intelligible in ways that generate this dissonance, Foucault’s theorization of the mode of subjection and ethical substance (see Chapter 2) is drawn upon in relation to an ethics of the self. The mode of subjection in cosmetic surgery discourse is explored in terms of the hermeneutics of the subject which installs the interiority of the subject and defines its relation to ‘truth’. The focus is then directed to the ‘body’ to explore how the ‘older’ ageing body is objectified and rendered problematic through discourses of ageing. It is these discourses of ageing that constitute the normative body as ‘youthful’ and problematizes the ‘older’ body as the ethical substance to be worked over by the practice of cosmetic surgery. This normative and essentialist system of inscription thus remains anchored in the ‘old discourses and dividing practices’ (Gilleard and Higgs, 2013) of ageing that restrict possibilities for the embodiment of becoming ‘older’.