Michel Foucault Quotes on Freedom

Foucault's late lectures and the second and third volumes of the History of Sexuality — The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (both 1984) — turn from the analysis of disciplinary power to the recovery, in Greco-Roman ethics, of the practices of freedom by which subjects constitute themselves as ethical agents. Freedom on Foucault's late account is not the metaphysical attribute of a sovereign self but a practical relation to oneself developed through technologies of the self: the philosophical exercises, askesis, and self-examination by which one transforms one's own existence into a work of art. The framework is not a return to liberal humanism but its genealogical alternative, an ethics of self-fashioning consistent with the earlier analyses of how subjects are constituted within power.