Michel Foucault And The Cultiv

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no voice of their own.
Foucault was fascinated by what one or a group has to suppress and reject to form a positive conception of itself. He believed that our conception of ourselves as subjects depends on controlling or excluding whole classes of people who do not fit our Enlightened category of �normal�. The same devices we use to understand and control these marginalized groups are also essential to understanding and controlling �normal� individuals.
This practice is always executed by power. Therefore, who we are is itself the result of the exercise of this power. In this sense, power serves as the other side of knowledge. For Foucault, power produces knowledge and each one directly implies the other. It is impossible for power to be exercised without knowledge, and it is impossible for knowledge not to procure power. �There is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same ...

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to think of life and art together. The are of the self was inventing who one can be, not the process of discovering who one really is. The creation of art was Foucault�s model for the care of the self. Accordingly, he viewed lives aesthetically; i.e. the artistic creation of the self must use elements which one already faces.
Foucault suggests that we approach our self-cultivation in an artistic sense, but he argues that one of the most important aspects of the activity devoted to oneself is that is constitutes a true social practice. Taking care of oneself is not relegated to just exercising, meditation, readings, and the recollection of truth, although all these are necessary. There ...

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