ABSTRACT
Michel Foucault recasts the agonism of aesthetic self-production in terms of an ethico-political relation to others. For this self-transforming ethics, he maintains, has strategically targeted effects on the particular practices or social relations of power within which it occurs. With the strategic capacity to adopt a variety of different styles of conduct, according to particular social contexts, the Foucauldian self upholds an ethico-aesthetic politics of truth and freedom. Foucault's genealogical dispositif of discursive and non-discursive practices is further developed as the cultural, historical nexus of power/knowledge relations. The historical ontology of individual conduct, Foucault argues, is distinct from what he earlier referred to as the exercise of power. The historical ontology of individual conduct has three principal modes of interrogation. The first concerns the ethical substance of individual being. The second level of interrogation concerns an individual's form of subjection. The third mode concerns the techniques of self-conduct or subjectivization.
