Michel Foucault and the aesthetics of existence: ethics, politics and truth

Abstract

The courage of truth-telling as a scandalous mise-en-scène by which the prevailing social conventions of an epoch are questioned is the fundamental feature of the Cynics' parrhesia, a philosophical movement in which Michel Foucault connects the ethics of self-care with a praxis irreducible to Platonism, insofar as in it living with attachment to the truth supposes neither an access to the realm of pure Forms nor a renunciation of self, but an asceticism of immanent characteristics or, in other words, an aesthetics of existence that implies a radical rupture with the present, making true life at the same time an other life.