ABSTRACT
The 'non-positive affirmation' of non-identity is arguably the most controversial feature of Michel Foucault's thought on freedom that, furthermore, is rarely addressed in the commentary on Foucault's work. This chapter addresses the two steps, in which this affirmation proceeds. Firstly, in his late writings on ethics and aesthetics of existence Foucault uncouples the ethico-epistemic nexus that defines the subject's identity in the Western culture. Secondly and consequently, identity, no longer conceived as an expression of subjective interiority, is externalised or bracketed off from one's existence as an externally designed instrument of subjection. Diagrammatic identity is not eliminated but, strictly speaking, bracketed off, 'retained' only in the sense of being set aside. This formula demonstrates that the subject of concrete freedom fashions itself through a homonymous difference from its own diagrammatic identity and a metonymic displacement from it, thereby emerging as one's own meto-homonymous double at the exterior limit of the diagram.
