Introduction

“Nothing in man,” wrote Michel Foucault in his famous essay on Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy, “not even his body – is sufficiently stable to serve as the basis for selfrecognition or for understanding other men” (Foucault 1977: 153). Drawing from Nietzsche’s understanding of the body as self-differentiating becoming, Foucault reminds us how the body is constitutively unstable, always foreign to itself – an open process of continuous self-estrangement where the most fundamental physiological and sensorial functions endure ongoing oscillations, adjustments, breaks, dysfunctions, and optimizations, as well as “the construction of resistances” (153). The construction of resistances, for Foucault, would be so many ways of reinventing not only subjectivity but also a whole new corporeal project, what he later called “a livable life.” ¹