Foucault: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by Gutting Gary

Author:Gutting, Gary [Gutting, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2005-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

to be modern is not to accept oneself as one is in the flux of the passing moments; it is to take oneself as object of a complex and difficult elaboration … Modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself.

(EW III, 311)

Foucault clearly does not accept all the details of Baudelaire’s picture of modernity; for example his understanding of self-transformation in terms of the dandy’s anti-natural elegance, or his claim that the modern project cannot be carried out politically or socially but only aesthetically. But Foucault does accept a general ‘ethos’ of modernity, which, he says, consists not in any set of doctrines but in a critical attitude or orientation towards our historical era. Further, this orientation is, like Baudelaire’s, towards a transformation of the present self.

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