ABSTRACT
In an interview concerning his unfinished work, On the Genealogy of Ethics, Michel Foucault, questioning if humans are “able to have an ethics of acts and their pleasure which would be able to take into account the pleasure of the other” (346), contemplated,
What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals, or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, not our life? (350)
An affirmation of “the pleasure of the other” indeed takes both an aesthetical appreciation of pleasure and an ethical embrace of the other, and it could move us beyond a “Slave ethics [that] … begins by saying no to an ‘outside,’ an ‘other,’ a nonself” (Nietzsche 171). But it shouldn’t lead us to, as Nietzsche expected, an ethics of “triumphant self-affirmation” (170-71); nor return us to eighteenth-century aesthetic moral philosophies, which, under the banner of “the beautiful soul,” appeared as “an alternative to the traditional ethical system of the Christian religion” and established “yet another abstract principle: Humanity itself” (Norton 211, 212)—a principle, I might add, that has since haunted us in our every step toward the other. Instead, an aesthetical ethics that Foucault-only too briefly-envisioned here would be one of pleasant reciprocity between the self and the other.
