Life as a Work of Art: Foucault, Wilde and the aesthetics of existence Richard Miskolci Universidade Federal de So Carlos Brazil

In one of the last interviews that he gave, Michel Foucault made the following observation: What surprises me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that has to do only with objects, rather than individuals, or life... Yet, couldnt the life of each individual become a work of art? (Foucault: 1994b, p.350). There is a marvelous similarity that can be found between the query of this contemporary French thinker and Oscar Wildes claim that the goal of life is to turn it into an artistic creation. Several similarities can be found between Foucaults project of a return to Antiquity in search of aesthetics of the self and Wildes reflections on the possibility of self creation through what he had referred to as a new Helenism. At the end of the nineteenth century, Wilde engaged in reflections on the social position that could enable one to create oneself while remaining at a distance from hegemonic norms. One century later, Foucault set out to invent new relationships between individuals that would allow them to rethink themselves and to resist power. Both Foucault and Wilde dared to think and live in ways that transgressed hegemonic social norms. What brings them close to one another is exactly that which separates them from a large part of their contemporaries. Each in his way, built a life on the margens, a course that ran parallel to what was socially acceptable. Due to the specificities of each ones personality, but even more to the different periods in which they lived, their lives were marked by unique forms of resistance. What I will go on to explore here is how these forms of resistance had their origins in commitment to and complicity with a stigmatized social group. The parallel lives of the pote maudit and the philosophe gauche During the seventies, Foucault came up with the idea of publishing the autobiographical narratives of individuals who had gained infamy in society. His goal was to provide visibility to lives that had been absolutely singular, lives in which marginality and rejection had been such strong themes that any proximity with those considered normal were absolutely out of the question.[1] In other words, what the philosopher wanted to do was to provide evidence and understanding of how the social rejection of difference can produce transgression, showing how those who transgress have been condemned to the realm of those deprived of memory, of voice, and of reason. Each in his/her own way, these infamous lives can all be characterized by their unbreakable distance from the realm of hegemonic social norms. The stories that Foucault presents thus enable us to discern the limits of acceptable social identity and accepted social behavior. Sexuality and crime, borderline experiences that were expressed through the lives of the previously unknown Barbin and Rivire, had already produced scandal and indignation at the end of the 19th century, in the elegant figure of an artist of renowned intellectual stature, Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wildes 1895 trial provides evidence of how it is also in the intellectual arena that lives that exemplify resistance to any parallels with the historic figures

institutionalized by good society can be found. The case had international repercussion. Silenced and condemned to two years of forced labor, Wilde experienced social rebuke in the flesh. If those who are accused in these circumstances tend to be seen as representatives of their species, so Wilde came to be seen as a martyr for love with an unspeakable name. That famous expression allows us to recognize the moral atmosphere in which love between men was seen as shameful, something so terrible that it could not be mentioned, pertaining to the realm of the unspeakable. (Cf. Eribon, 2001, p.220). Oscar Wildes trial was a result of his decision to bring his life style out into the open. This aesthete was condemned for having refused to keep his love life underground, as most of his contemporaries did. When the Marquis of Queensberry, his lovers father, left a note in his closet with his caricature and the phrase, Oscar Wilde is posing as a sondomite (sic), he could have kept quiet, but decided instead to suit the nobleman for slander. In accordance with the legal procedures of the period, Wilde was obliged to prove that the libel was unfounded, but Queensberry hired detectives and was able to prove that the slander was fact, and thus, a crime for which Wilde was then condemned. Wilde lived in way that meant the construction of himself and of his existence outside the pale of social normativity. This aesthetic and existential endeavor of his was fueled by the way he understood his interest in other young men, that is, how he associated it with the studies of Hellenism that he had engaged in since his youth and had pursued in greater depth within the Hellenist circles of Oxford. There, at the most traditional of English universities, groups of artists and intellectuals who shared aesthetic interests flourished and that form of sociability that we refer to today as homoeroticism was looked upon with admiration. In spite of the small circle in which it was possible to form groups of peoplewho sympathized with the cause, through Wilde this embryo of a new form of sociability made waves that would be felt beyond the confines of the universitythrough Wilde. His ideas were received so well that he was invited to give a series of lectures in the US in 1882.In the talks that he gave on the English renaissance, Wilde emphasized the possibility to return to a conception of life as existential practice whose underlyingg oal was to make life into a work of art. In Wildes viewpoint, the major obstacle tothe aesthetization of life were existing moral codes. Among Wildes essays, the one inwhich he comes closest to a critique of morality is The Decadence of Lying, inwhich, under the pretext of opposition to the ascendancy of realism-naturalism inliterature, he presents his reflections on the need to overcome conformist values. It isalso in this essay that he turns Aristoteles on his head, in making the assertion that lifeimitates art. His goal was to emphasize estheticisms potential to transform humanlife.Aesthetecism was a link connecting English and French writers. CharlesBaudelaires ideas on the figure of the dandy made their mark on the way Wilde livedhis life. The dandy was a modern character, rebellious and postChristian. Acting ashis own double, the dandy was an individual and non transferable creation, emanatingthe charm of uniqueness, of the aesthetization of self and of a particular form of relationship to the world. In Baudelaires words, the dandy was one who wielded hisown personality against tradition within a process of the building of the self that canonly be explained in reference to the existential practice of aestheticism. Thus, thedandy imposed the most rigid of disciplines upon himself in demanding that throughhis own body, thought, feelings and passions in other words, all dimensions of hisexistence he create himself as a work of art.. [2]

Within a society in which even the revitalization of Antiquitys passionatefriendship was based on a virile project of national regeneration, dandyism was haunted by the stigma of feminization. Men who were suspected of loving membersof the same sex were seen as effeminate, which meant lacking in honor and virility, or as sodomites, a word which defines the relationship between two men in terms thathad not yet been pathologized.There is absolutely no sign in Wildes writings that he saw erotic interest in people of the same sex as a sign of pathology. In Degeneration (1893), published twoyears before Wildes indictment, the German psychiatrist Max Nordau associated thewriter with immorality, sin and crime. In 1897, Wilde rejected Nordaus claim withsarcasm: The fact that in the judgment of several German wise men, I am also seenas a problem of pathology is interesting to those German wise men alone. (Wildeapud Eribon, 2001, p.272) Nonetheless, historically speaking, Wilde came to represent the figure of homose xual as criminal. His specter haunts the life and work of large part of theartists and writers of the twentieth century; in fact, it was Wildes trial that broughtthe very term homosexual which had entered psychiatric discourse in 1870 - intocommon use in the English language. [3] Wildes indictment provided public exposure for what many had sufferedindividually and anonymously. Thus, the case of this pote maudit came tocontribute to the cultural construction of the homosexual as a category, albeit anegative one, outside the reigning family and moral orders. That form of love withan unspeakable name was brought into the order of discourse, but imprisoned withina normative vocabulary that classified it as a crime and increasingly, as a pathology. .Starting with Wilde, then, a pro-homosexual discourse emerges, a sort of discourse of rebuttal, which nonetheless continues to be tangled in the web of devaluation that it sought to free itself from. And paradoxically, within the reigningsituation, even the words spoken against homosexuality represented a discursiverecognition of that form of love.Many years later, within a much changed historical context, Michel Foucaultwas faced with a homosexuality that had been socially pathologized. The troublesand difficulties that this brought him should not be not surprising. In a society inwhich the love between men had become the object of psychoanalytic and psychiatricknowledge and discourse while at the same time was, as practice, forced to remain behind the stage of reputable society, psychic suffering would abound. In his yo uth,Foucault was confronted by an environment that was refractive to the way he expressed affectivity. The anguish he experienced because of his difference led himas far as two attempts at suicide, between the late 1940s and the early fifties.In contrast to what Wilde had encountered, the socially constructed figure of the homosexual was a character on the social stage of the world that Foucault livedin. This much-feared identity was equated with mental illness, marginality and adestiny that was seen as a condemnation to self-destruction. The ideal of passionatefriendship between young men had in hegemonic discourse been declared a crimeand a pathology. Within this scenario that relegated his feelings to the infirmary,Foucault followed the path of resistance. His reflections took on the character of arebuttal of psychiatric discourse regarding relationships between people of the samesex.Perhaps the most explicit influence in his work comes from Nietzche. It is nocoincidence that the German thinker

had himself lived through the tragic experiencethat he describes through his own confrontation with the morality and pathologizingtheories of his time.Foucault increasingly turned to critical thought as a form of transformation, ascan be seen in the course he gave in 1957 on The Concept of Love in FrenchLiterature, from Sade to Genet. (Cf. Eribon, 2001, p.366). The topic of love astransgresion of the social and familial order, insane love, was his point of departurein Madness and Civilization and marked his later books in his singular style. Madness and Civilization has often been classified as the history of a(homo)sexuality that was still unnameable, but that he would come to deal with moreexplicitly toward the end of his life. Although this assertion may be polemic, there isagreement that beginning the first volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucaultturned his attention to that issue. No sooner had he written it than a number of experiences he had led him to reformulate his project. Instead of continuing in his previous endeavor to free sexuality from its pathologization, he now turned toAntiqu ity in search of a different way of understanding sexual practices.Foucaults reformulation of A History of Sexuality originated in the frequentvisits that he made to the US toward the end of the 1970s. It was at this point that,when he had already refuted the medicalization of society and pathologization of identities, that his ideas turn to the issue of the constitution of another type of relationship to power. It is no exaggeration to give his American experience credit for inspiring this mutation, for it was in the US and Canada that the philosopher became acquainted with communities that had truly been created through these new existential practices.The North American gay neighborhoods founded a space in large citiesthrough a social and political process of geographic densification and of theconstitution of new sociabilities and life styles. Contact with this experiment ledFoucault to reflect upon homosexuality as a way of building a life style that workedagainst the psychologization of the self. In 1982, for example, he declared that the gaymovement needed more of an art of living than a science of sexuality and added:We need to understand that, with our desire, through them, we establish new formsof relationship, and new forms of love and creation. Sex is no longer a fatality; it is away of gaining access to a creative life. (Foucault, 2004, p.260)There is a flagrant similarity between this position and the views that wereheld in Helenist circles, but now, sexuality among members of the same sex no longer needed to be disguised through an appeal to passionate friendship nor cultivatedexclusively on the basis on an archaic model of an older man and a youth. In contrastto the Oxford Helenists, Foucault did not study Antiquity in search of a model for asupposed renaissance of a new form of civilization. Rather, his goal was to reflectupon new forms of relationship to the self and to power, through practices of the self that could be found in ancient manuals. He sought to recuperate for our times thenotion of Philosophy as the art of life, through the constituion of an aesthetics of contemporary existenceAccording to Foucault, the aesthetics of existence was to have two pillars: a politics of friendship and the intensification of pleasures. He emphasized both theneed to build a friendship that was deep, reciprocal and transformative, and theintensification

of pleasure through the erotization of the entire body, or to invent new pleasures going beyond the common triad of sex, food and drink (cf. Foucault, 2004, p.264). In this regard, it is impossible not to alude once again to the closeness of hisideas and Wildes proposal of a return to passionate friendship that was alsoaccompanied by a concern with pleasure.In Foucaults view, normalized society of the late nineteenth century hadextinguished friendship and reduced the bonds of affection to institutionalized formssuch as marriage. It was in light of this that Foucault devoted himself to hisintellectual projects, and then went on to modify them and to engage in thereconstruction of his philosophy on existential bases. It was here that he came to expound Philosophy as an art of living and began to reflect upon a philosophical practice that would turn life into a work of art. The Aesthetics of Existence and Heterotopias During his work on the last volumes of The History of Sexuality, Foucault began his return to Antiquity in order to recover Philosophy as the art of living, thatis, a philosophical ethos in which theory and practice would be inseparable.In Antiquity, philosophy and way of life were one and the same thing, to theextent that most philosophers sought to become living examples of their ideas, puttingtheir ideas in practice in such a way as to become their embodiment. Philosophy proposed an art of living in which practices of the self occupied a central role. In theMiddle Ages, however, with the separation of theologia and philosophia, the latter became mere theoretical discourse, separated from the spiritual exercises that, fro mthat time on, became the privilege of Christian mysticism. (cf. Hadot, 1987).Philosophy progressively became little more than a theoretical languagereserved for specialists and, starting in the eighteenth century, became imprisoned behind the walls of the university as the discourse of professors. It is in stark contrastto such a theoretical philosophy that Foucault engages in his exploration of philosophy as the art of living and as stylistic praxis. Philosophy has for him anasceti c essence; it is, in other words, an exercising of the self in thought, though notin the Christian sense of ascesis as renunciation and restriction but rather in the sensein that askeses was used in Greek and Latin philosopgy, as the art of living, as self-elaboration. .Foucaults reflections led him to propose an aesthetics of existence in the present, a form of resistance to the powers of normalization. The transgressive natureof his proposal is due to its minority characteristics. According to Foucault, a newform of existence could only be reached through alternatives to the socially prescribedand institutionalized forms of relationships.Bringing ancient philosophy back for our times means understanding it as atechnique of the self, an activity of self-transformation, but it is important toemphasize that this does not imply that the Greco-Roman model been adopted.Foucault did not consider the Greeks admirable nor did he see their way of life as analternative for our times. His proposal was a different one, inspired only in theancients techniques of the self and in his sympathy for the creative potential he found

in American gay communities. It is at any rate necessary to proceed with caution andavoid the conflation of that which gave rise to his proposal and his proposal per se,that is, the analysis that the scholar made of American gay communities leads in thedirection of the invention of something even differentAs Foucault saw it, the aesthetics of existence should be conceived in such away as not to reproduce the man who is his own master that is represented in thethought of the most perfect form of expression. The aesthetics of existence consistsof the elaboration of a non-normative relationship with ones self. It is a politicalattitude founded on resistance to imposed formas of subjectivity, which Foucaultidentified as prefigured in the way the gay community had rehabilitated friendship sothat it was not dissociated from sex.Since Antiquity, friendship tended to be understood as a relationship thatexcluded sexuality, but it was Christianity that with Saint Augustine cleared up thisambiguity, substituting philia with agape, that is, friendship in place of the love of ones neighbor that had been founded on Christian cristas. The politics of friendship that Foucault proposed did not only turn this desexualization around. His proposal of an ascesis and a gay form of life based on friendship has as its goal thec onstitution of a community on non-identitary bases.Friendship creates a community through shared experience, and thustransforms an individual problematics into one of collective experience. This is whyfor Foucault, the experience of loving someone of the same sex involves the possibility of ascesis as learning, not as the discovery of a some hidden truth. Thus, itis a way of loving that would enable one to attempt the discovery of what can be donewith the freedom one has at his/her disposal. In this way, it would lead to the possibility of invention or transformation not only of the self, but also ones relationt o the other and to society.Homosexuality is for Foucault an experience, an open process of transformation, a life style that goes far beyond sexual intercourse. It is a process of reinvention of the self through friendship, an alternative to confinement within sex or within the romantic love that isolates the individual from society. In this light, tohave interest in someone of the same sex can be the means for a transformativeexistential practice, rather than a point of departure for the discovery or revelation of an identity. Once the search for identity has been rejected, there are still questions to be explored regarding experience as the basis of an aesthetics of existence. There are limitations that are imposed by the unfinished character of this Foucaultian problemof life as a work of life, impreciseness regarding what the philosopher meant by pleasure as well as difficulty in determining just how far his sympathy for NorthAme rican gay communities went.In turning ethics into a question for historical research, bodily experimentationand aesthetic judgment, Foucault avoided any sanction of moral norms. He concernedhimself with new forms of organizing the way one leads ones life, which led him toface up to Ethics most basic question: How should I live? The fact that he took theunderstanding of life as an aesthetic experience so seriously was due to his refusal tothink of it according to any schema of moral codes.To think of life as a work of life implies the recovery of an understanding of Philosophy as an existential practice to be carried out with the acceptance of the risksthat are implied. This practice of the self involves learning, self-transformation and,mainly, the resistance to adaptation

within socially prescribed ways of life. Care of ones self then comes to rest on a ethics of non-conformism, rebellion, and rejectionof normalization; thus, the appeal to plasticity, to the making of differences which inturn means moving away from assimilationist utopias that are hardly able to concealtheir homophobic origins. On the contrary, life as a work of life fits perfectly into theidea that Foucault had expressed since the 1970s, that of heterotopias, the ability tocreate differences in relation to social stanndards and constitute spaces of resistance inwhich these differences find a placeIn his conference, On other spaces, Foucault asserted that each society has itsheterotopias, in other words, real spaces in which all aspects of its culture arecontained, but also simultaneously represented, contested and turned inside out. Nothing could be closer to this than the cultural resistance that he encountered in N orth American gay communities. Nonetheless, he was not satisfied with thoserealities that he came to know, but analyzed the experiences of his time as social processes open to other different courses of developmentWilde and Foucaults reflections on an aesthetics of existence producediscomfort insofar as they are explicitly founded on minoritarian goals: another wayof life, not imprisoned within sexuality or an identity, but based on the non-conformist potential that can be found in the relationships between people of the samesex. (cf. Foucault, 1994). REFERENCES. BRISTOW, J. Sexuality. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.ELLMANN, R. Oscar Wilde. Translation:. J. A. Arantes. So Paulo: Cia das Letras,1989.ERIBON, D. Michel Foucault. So Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1990._____. Foucault e seus Contemporneos. So Paulo: Cia das Letras, 1996_____. Reflexiones sobre la cuestin gay. Barcelona: Anagrama, 2001.FOUCAULT, M. De Outros Espaos. Lecture/ Mimeo. No date.______. Dits et crits IV. Paris: Gallimard, 1994.______. Eu, Pierre Rivire, que degolei minha me, minha irm e meu irmo.(Rio deJaneiro: Graal, 1977.______. Herculine Barbin O Dirio de Um Hermafrodita. (Rio de Janeiro: FranciscoAlves, 1982).______. Michel Foucault, uma entrevista: Sexo, Poder e a Poltica da Identidade. In:Verve Revista do Nu-Sol. So Paulo: Programa de Estudos Ps-Graduados emCincias Sociais da PUC-SP, n.5, May 2004, p.260-277._____. On the Genealogy of Ethics. In: Rabinow, P. The Foucault Reader.New York:,1984.______. Uma Entrevista com Michel Foucault In: Verve Revista do NuSol. SoPaulo: Programa de Estudos Ps-Graduados em Cincias Sociais da PUC-SP, n.5,May 2004, p.240259.HADOT, P. Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique. Paris: tudesAugustinienn es, 1987.MILLER, J. The Prophet and the Dandy Philosophy as a Way of Life in Nietzscheand Foucault. Social Research, Winter, 1998.ORTEGA, F. Amizade e Esttica da Existncia em Foucault. Rio de Janeiro: Graal,1999.PATER, W. La Renaissance. Trad. F. R.-Cornaz. Paris: Librarie Payot, 1917.VEYNE, P. Le Dernier Foucault et sa Moral In: Critique. Paris, vol.XLIL, n. 471-472, 1985. p.933-941WILDE, O. Obra Completa. Rio de Janeiro: Jos Aguilar, 1961._____. The Portable Oscar Wilde. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1981. ** Professor of Sociology at the Universidade Federal de So Carlos (UFSCar), Brazilufscar7@gmail.com [1]

I refer here to the autobiograohies of Pierre Rivire, Herculine Barbin, e HenryLegrand, that Foucault published. The latter two were included in collection that wasintitled, Parallel Lives. [2] For a study on Foucault as a sort of philosophical dandy, see Miller, 1998.. [3] The terms homosexual and homosexuality originate in the theories of criminology and sexology belonging to the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies defining this sexual practice as a criminal and pathological identity. For astudy of the history of sexuality and sexological theories see Bristow (1997)