Ontology and Resistance: The Constitution of Oneself as a Paradigm of Political Action in the Late Foucault

• Main Author: Jorge Ignacio Moreno Heredia
• Format: Article
• Language: Catalan
• Published: Universitat de Barcelona 2018-01-01
• Series: Oxímora. Revista Internacional de Ética y Política
• Subjects: Ontología-política; autonomía; inmanencia; uso; biopolítica
• Online Access: http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/oximora/article/view/20620

When we think of Michel Foucault’s contribution to the history of contemporary political thought, we don’t usually refer to his investigations, conducted in the eighties, into the ethics of the care of oneself of Greco-Roman Antiquity. Does that research, nevertheless, lack any political meaning or consequence? To answer this question, we must first put forward the terms of what is mainly at stake in those investigations: the possibility to think differently what it means for a subject to be constituted. With them, Foucault seems to have found an experience and a practice of subjectivation that, once its ontological structure becomes clear, also allows us think of a concept of political action as immanent and autonomous subjectivation capable of resisting the modern dispositifs of power.