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Continental Philosophy Review 34: 165–181, 2001.
© 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

‘Must we burn Foucault?’ Ethics as art of living:
Simone de Beauvoir and Michel Foucault*

KAREN VINTGES

Department of Philosophy, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: [e-mail]

Abstract. The title of this article refers to Beauvoir’s essay “Must We Burn De Sade?” (1953/
1952). Analogous to Beauvoir’s essay on Sade, this article is something of an apology for
Foucault. I use Beauvoir’s essay on Sade to discuss Foucault’s concept of ethics as an art of
living. I conclude that the final Foucault’s thought on ethics can be labelled a post-existen-
tialism, combining postmodern thinking and the issues of freedom and commitment in an
inspiring way. I argue, however, that the heuristics of Foucault’s later work is undertheorized.
Comparing Foucault’s approach with Beauvoir’s own concept of ethics as art of living shows
hers to be superior in that it has a place for the emotions. The cold stoicism of the final Foucault
only deals with emotion from the point of view of repression and sublimation. Foucault’s post-
existentialism must therefore be enriched with Beauvoir’s concepts. I conclude that aspects
of the theoretical frameworks of both Foucault and Beauvoir can contribute to the solution
of some of the dilemmas of postmodern thinking with respect to politics and political theory.

In this article, I try to outline a ‘post-existentialism’ that can fill a hiatus in
postmodern thinking with respect to politics and ethics. After discussing
Foucault’s late work in light of Beauvoir’s essay, “Faut il brûler Sade?”
(Beauvoir 1952), I develop a comparison of Beauvoir’s and Foucault’s eth-
ics. In a concluding section, I explain what I think we can use from both au-
thors when we try to rethink ethics and politics “through” postmodernism.

Who was Michel Foucault?

Why Foucault? One might be surprised that in the context of a Beauvoir panel
I point to his theories on the subject and subjectivity. His biographies suggest
that Foucault was something of a misogynist. Indeed, from Macey’s biogra-
phy, The Lives of Michel Foucault (1993), we learn that he was a Beauvoir-
hater in particular, treating her with icy politeness at best. Nonetheless, I think
Foucault’s last work has something in common with Beauvoir’s – an impor-
tant clue, or even a possible solution to dilemmas that postmodernists, includ-
ing postfeminists, face regarding politics and ethics.

1

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Notoriously, the issue in the debate around Foucault’s work is its lack of

an ethics.

2

Foucault is heavily criticized for not offering explicit normative

criteria. For instance, Habermas complains that Foucault’s work is internally
contradictory: a normative framework is hidden in his work, but he refuses –
and even makes it impossible – to articulate one (Habermas 1987). In her well-
known article, “Michel Foucault : A ‘Young Conservative’?” Fraser criticizes
Foucault for being a moral nihilist after all (Fraser 1994). McNay concludes
that while feminist theory can use some of Foucault’s insights, given that
political movements like feminism require a normative viewpoint, his theo-
retical framework is unacceptable.

3

Taylor, who at first criticised Foucault

primarily for his methodological inconsistencies (Taylor 1984), treats him
much more harshly in his impressive Sources of the Self (1989), identifying
him as a purely Nietzschean thinker who espouses distinctive and unrealistic
notions of radical freedom and moral nihilism. Taylor repeats this attack in
his Ethics of Authenticity (1991), lumping him and other postmodernists to-
gether with Nietzscheans like Artaud, Bataille, and others he labels “apostles
of evil.”

Is this too harsh? To paraphrase Beauvoir’s metaphorical question about

Sade: Must we burn Foucault? Like Beauvoir, I want to offer something of an
apology for my author. As Beauvoir says of Sade I will say of Foucault. His
merit is that he transformed his experiences into an oeuvre, thus assuming
responsibility for them. However, I will also argue that, unlike Sade, Foucault
did leave a positive but undertheorized ethics – especially in the two last vol-
umes of his history of sexuality (Foucault 1986a, 1986b) and in late articles
and interviews in Rabinow’s collection (1997).

Who was this Michel Foucault anyway? In person, he was not easily over-

looked – lively, sparkling eyed, energetic, bald, and above all, smallish. (Run-
ning into him in a corridor at the University of Vincennes in Paris, I remember
him barely reaching to my shoulder.) From his biographies, including Hervé
Guibert’s novel (Guibert 1990), one gets the impression that he was also a
fragmented man, occupied in many ways, always somewhere else, always
active, totally dispersed into the world.

Foucault, famously experimentalist about sex and violence, loved Sade –

or so another biographer informs us (Miller 1993). For a while, Foucault iden-
tified himself with Sade, and throughout his life he was attracted to sadomaso-
chistic sexuality and near-death experiences, always looking for sensations
on the border, frequenting violent orgies in San Francisco leather bars in the
midst of the AIDS-crisis. What is really interesting about all this, however,
Miller misses completely, namely, the way Foucault made philosophy out of
his life and “lived” his philosophy. With enormous power – and here I para-

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phrase Beauvoir on Sade – he transformed his eroticism from an individual
attitude into a challenge to society, charging his experiences with an ethical
significance.

4

And by putting his experiences in writing, he at the same time

transformed or rather created himself as he stated in an interview with Duccio
Trombadori (Foucault 1980).

Miller is therefore wrong to see Foucault’s work as an immediate expres-

sion of his sexual life (Eribon 1994). Granted that according to Foucault him-
self, “Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work it has been
on the basis of my own experience.” He even called his works “a few frag-
ments of an autobiography” (1988, p. 156, in Simons 1995, p. 8). Yet if his
personal experiences motivated his books, it does not follow that they are
merely personal confessions (Duyvendak 1995). For one thing, he writes of
his experiences stressing how they put him in touch with what was going on
around him. “It is because I thought I could recognize in the things I saw, in
the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, si-
lent shocks, malfunctionings . . . that I undertook a particular piece of work”
(Foucault 1988, p. 156, in Simons 1995, p. 8). Moreover, he makes a point of
saying that an author transforms himself in the process of writing. “The ‘ma-
jor work’ of a writer is, in the end, himself in the process of writing his books
. . . the work includes the whole life as well as the text. The work is more than
the work: the subject who is writing is part of the work” (1987, p. 18, in
Simons 1995, p. 8). Simons rightly argues that it is in part through writing
“that Foucault produces himself as an individual who resists current modes
of subjectification” (Simons 1995, p. 7). Again paraphrasing Beauvoir on Sade,
I say that Foucault’s emotional nature and the peculiar character of his sexu-
ality are for us data we can merely note. His chief interest lies in the manner
in which he assumed responsibility for them, in an overall project of self-crea-
tion.

5

Beauvoir stresses that it is to Sade’s credit that he clearly shows the self-

ishness of individuals and that he makes us aware of the enmity and separate-
ness between people. She states that he wanted to face and endorse this aspect
of human existence. “De Sade tried to make of his psycho-physical destiny
an ethical choice, and of this act, in which he assumed his separateness, he
attempted to make an example and an appeal. It is thus that his adventure
assumes a wide human significance” (Beauvoir 1953, p. 11). Thus Sade’s
merit, she concludes,

lies not only in his having proclaimed aloud what everyone admits with
shame to himself, but in the fact that he did not simply resign himself. He
chose cruelty rather than indifference. . . . He emerged with no revelation,

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but at least he disputed all the easy answers. If ever we hope to transcend
the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be
aware of its existence. Otherwise, promises of happiness and justice con-
ceal the worst dangers” (p. 89).

We can, I think, make a similar judgment about Foucault. Fragmented, rest-
less, and active as he, and his sex life, seem to have been, at least he did not
restrict himself to a passive undergoing of his experiences. On the contrary,
he proclaimed them aloud and took responsibility for them, relating his work
to his experiences and constructing himself through his work as an individual
who questioned all the easy answers. It is to Foucault’s credit that he focused
on the fragmented character of people, because if ever we hope to overcome
this fragmentation, “we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its
existence” (Beauvoir 1953, p. 89).

Thus far I have argued, analogous to Beauvoir’s conclusion on Sade, that

it is Foucault’s merit that he transformed his experiences into an oeuvre, at
the same time creating himself. But does Foucault’s own theoretical frame-
work allow such an interpretation? To find a concept of self-creation we have
to turn to Foucault’s later work.

In the works of the 1970’s, Foucault sticks to analyzing how we in the West

today are produced, as unitary “subjects,” by all kinds of disciplinary prac-
tices and discourses. In Discipline and Punish (1979/1975), he argues that since
around 1800, a “soul” or inner self is installed in us by panoptic, controlling
institutions like prisons, schools, hospitals and welfare institutions. In his first
volume on the history of sexuality, Foucault claims to find an interior subject
posited at an even deeper level – the deep self as an effect of the so called
“scientia sexualis” (Foucault 1981/1976). The scientia sexualis consists of
discourses such as psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, and medicine. These
discourses, together with all the practices and technologies that surround them,
force us to talk about sex: What do you like best? How often? With whom or
what? Supposedly, “truths” are thereby elicited from us on “our sexuality.”
But what is actually happening is that these “truths” are being produced
through techniques of confession. Each of us is thus allocated a sexual iden-
tity (homosexual, heterosexual, paedophile, sadist, masochist, etc.). It is not
that such identities actually exist. Rather, “all along the great lines which the
development of the deployment of sexuality has followed since the nineteenth
century, one sees the elaboration of this idea that there exists something other
than bodies, organs, somatic localizations, functions, anatomo-physiological
systems, sensations and pleasures” (1981, pp. 152–153).

Into the 1970’s, then, Foucault depicts human beings as really fragmented,

with the unitary self being only an effect of normalization and discipline. We

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are subjected to and judged by the power of the Norm (which determines what
is normal, what is deviant) and thereby held in check through the determina-
tion of our identity. As for the so-called “deep self,” Foucault rejects this as
being just the ‘ordre intérieur’ of a dominating and continually inhibiting so-
cial order. Moreover, in this phase he also has an aversion to ethics because
he sees it as necessarily based on a concept of a deep self, on subjectivity as
space of self-control – in other words, on discipline.

By contrast, in his last works, Foucault makes room for – and urges us to

re-endorse – constructions of self-identity which escape the current forms of
subjectification. In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self (1986a, 1986b/
1984, respectively), revising his earlier hypothesis that talk about sexuality
only dates from the sixteenth century, he draws attention to the so-called pre-
scriptive discourses on sexuality in Greek and Roman culture – “that is, texts
whose main object, whatever their form (speech, dialogue, treatise, collection
of precepts, etc.) is to suggest rules of conduct. These texts thus served as
functional devices that would enable individuals to question their own con-
duct, to watch over and give shape to it, and shape themselves as ethical sub-
ject” (1986a, pp. 12–13). Studying antiquity’s discourses on sexuality he
comes across a type of ethics that from now on becomes his main topic.

In the preface to The Use of Pleasure, Foucault makes a distinction between

ethics and moral rules, or “moral codes.” Today, we only think of the former
in terms of the latter – i.e., of ethics in terms of prescriptions of how to be-
have. But in antiquity there were hardly any moral rules. Ethics consisted of
vocabularies that were intended as guides for the concrete shaping of one’s
own existence. These vocabularies constituted a relationship of the self to the
self; they envisioned “intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only
set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to
change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre
that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (pp.
10–11).

Foucault analyzes how the traditional Greek idea of an “aesthetics of ex-

istence” gradually develops into a conception of “care of the self” that culmi-
nates in a Greek-Roman type of ethics in the first and second century that
encourages the creation of an ethical self through self-techniques. He calls
these Greek and Hellenist ethical discourses “practices of freedom.”

6

In the

two books mentioned above Foucault tries to demonstrate how extensive these
“practices of freedom” were in antiquity – which is not to say they were meant
for everybody. They were aimed solely at free men, not at women and slaves.
He shows the extent to which techniques had been worked out in detail to
control and style their sexual behavior – everything from little self-tests (e.g.,

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trying to pass a beautiful boy in the street and not get sexually aroused) and
extensive written daily inventories of one’s actions to letter writing and so
called hypomnemata, that is, personal notebooks to record insights and ideas
to guide one’s future actions.

A freedom to create oneself thus was offered through vocabularies that

provided the tools and techniques to acquire an ethos. If our first defense of
Foucault above proceeds in analogy with Beauvoir’s apology of Sade, this is
allowed by his own concepts of ethics as “aesthetics of existence” and “care
of the self.” They entail the possibility of a free self-creation, a possibility that
is implied as well in Beauvoir’s approach to Sade – as also, for example, in
Sartre’s of Genet (1983/1952) and Baudelaire (1972/1946). However, at the
end of her essay, Beauvoir criticizes Sade for not offering any positive ethi-
cal solution. Here she refers to her own ethical theory. In what follows I will
argue that Foucault clearly differs from Sade in that his later work articulates
an ethics that confronts the dimension of the human condition he described
earlier.

Freedom for all

Like Sartre, Beauvoir was strongly opposed to positive moral theory. Exis-
tential philosophy states that every human being is free and has to invent his
or her own behavior, and there are no universally applicable maxims or moral
rules. But unlike Sartre, Beauvoir kept a lifelong interest in ethics. In her
philosophical essays, among them The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948/1947), she
stated that we have to adopt a “moral attitude,” which amounts to a striving
for the freedom not only of ourselves but also that of all other human beings.
In terms of Foucault we can say that this general rule is the only “moral code”
of her ethics. In The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir focuses mostly on the re-
lationship of the self to the self that goes with this moral code. We are free,
but we only practice freedom if we dare to situate ourselves and commit our-
selves to certain values. We therefore have to develop an individual identity
by creating a certain coherent trajectory in life, carefully styling our daily
behavior with this aim in mind (Vintges 1996). Not only do we find similari-
ties with the aesthetics of existence that Foucault detected in history. In The
Mandarins (1956/1954), a philosophical novel, Beauvoir launched a phrase
for such a type of ethics: “art de vivre,” the art of living, a phrase that shows
much resemblance to Foucault’s – both authors using the language of aesthetics
and art to indicate that we deal here with a creative process and not with the
application of general rules or laws.

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I have argued elsewhere that Beauvoir’s existentialist ethics is not Sartrean

in that she advocates a reflexive styling of one’s life, whereas for Sartre such
a reflection on one’s life is “bad faith.”

7

In my view Beauvoir’s autobiographi-

cal work amounts to such an ethical styling of life. It should be conceived of
as her art of living. Beauvoir wrote diaries and letters, as well as five volumes
of autobiography, all as ways of inventorying and styling her daily behavior,
thereby trying to create herself as an ethical – and political – subject that could
work for the freedom of her fellow human beings. Her writing practices were
for her a means of questioning her own conduct and shaping herself as ethi-
cal subject – not as an essential, unitary, self as effect of introspection or self-
realization, but as a coherent self that is the effect of stylisation and practical
philosophical self-creation.

In my view, Beauvoir’s thinking on ethics can contribute to the solution of

some apparent dilemmas of postmodernism – and postfeminism. She, like
Sartre, was thoroughly familiar with Surrealism and other ‘modernist’ move-
ments from which postmodernism inherited its suspicion of the unitary deep
self.

8

Beauvoir shared Sartre’s disgust for the idea of a deep inner self. If, un-

like Sartre, she wants us to win a different sort of self, this is because to her,
people should assume responsibility for a specific set of normative values by
providing themselves with a coherent identity through constant creative ac-
tivity. In this way, avant la lettre, she finds a way past postmodernism’s aver-
sion of the fixed, essential subject with a moral perspective. Her “art of living”
can contribute to filling in postmodernism’s hiatus in the field of ethics and
political theory. Whereas for postmodernists, any thinking in terms of iden-
tity is to be opposed as repressive (see Section III), Beauvoir reconceives the
theme of identity in order to show that when it is interpreted in terms of the
commitment to certain values, we practice and endorse freedom.

Here, I think, one finds a similarity with the later Foucault. Many Foucaultian

thinkers fail to see what is at stake in his final works. They fail to see that his
plea for an “aesthetics of existence” and a “care of the self” is in fact a plea
for a certain coherence of the self. Care of the self requires work on the self,
organising the fragments. Foucault thus reintroduces the theme of identity in
the following way. “Self . . . has two meanings. Auto means ‘the same,’ but it
also conveys the notion of identity. The latter meaning shifts the question from
‘What is this self?’ to ‘Departing from what ground shall I find my identity?’”
(1997a, p. 230). As with Beauvoir, this makes identity a function of a com-
mitment to some basic values from which we create ourselves. Foucault goes
on to say that what is at stake in the care of the self is not the soul-as-sub-
stance but the soul as activity (p. 231). Here we have a self that creates itself
through action in the world, beginning from some basic commitment.

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Foucault’s plea for the reintroduction of ethics as care of the self should

not be confused with Californian cults of the self that turn people into narcis-
sists: “they are diametrically opposed” in that the latter urge people “to dis-
cover one’s true self” (1997c, p. 271). For Foucault, moreover, the ethical
subject is always already a political subject. “Being occupied with oneself and
political activities are linked” (1997a, p. 231); and “freedom is thus inherently
political” (1997b, p. 286). In fact, Foucault’s real concern is politics not eth-
ics. People often see ethos as a purely personal matter, but Foucault’s con-
cept of ethos is political through and through. A concern for who you want to
be in life and how you want to act is a political concern. At the same time, it
is a concern about acting in the polis – making politics, in the stricter sense of
the word. For Foucault, both aspects of concern are interwoven; one cannot
be a good citizen if one does not take good care of oneself, and care of the
self spells itself out in a polis.

If, however, the later Foucault advocates a kind of free commitment to and

responsibility for “values,” the obvious question is, Which ones? Could these
be any values whatsoever? Antiquity’s self-technologies were aimed at self-
mastery, especially the mastery of one’s sexual life. Yet, Foucault argues, these
are all ethical vocabularies, because it was understood that only when we are
masters of ourselves can we relate to others without tyrannizing them. As he
puts it, articulating an explicit normative criterion, “The problem . . . [is] to
acquire . . . the ethos, the practice of the self, that will allow us to play these
games of power with as little domination as possible.”

9

Not only does Foucault

put forward a normative distinction of (practices of) freedom versus domina-
tion, he also advocates enlarging the domain of freedom practices over the
domain of the moral code. For him, the most important characteristic of the
ancient ethical vocabularies is that they are relatively autonomous and offer
the tools to freely create oneself as an ethical subject. Western culture has a
long tradition of such practices of the self, but they became invisible, he states
“after they were taken over to a certain extent by religious, pedagogical, medi-
cal, or psychiatric institutions.”

10

Foucault wants us to rescue freedom, or what

is left of it, from the disciplines and to re-endorse the ancient type of freedom
practices, taking back power over – and responsibility for – our lives and the
way we relate to others. He was concerned with the readmission of the an-
cient type of ethics but distanced himself explicitly from its content which
focused too strongly on the master-slave concept, linked as it was to “a virile
society, to dissymmetry, exclusion of the other. . . . All that is quite disgust-
ing!” (1997c, p. 258). Instead, he asks, “couldn’t everyone’s life become a
work of art?” (1997a, p. 261). Clearly, Foucault wants the domain of freedom
practices enlarged so that everybody has access to them.

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In his three articles on Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” he is more

explicit in this respect.

11

I have argued that the later Foucault’s concept of ethics

implies the idea of a political commitment to values. In his discussions of
Kant’s essay, he formulates his own political commitment, that is, the values
he wants to endorse through his oeuvre. In the third and most famous essay,
“What is Enlightenment?” (1997g), Foucault clearly sides with “modernism,”
in the sense of a Baudelairean attitude, namely, an attitude of awareness of
contingency, including the contingency of one’s self-understanding.

12

“Mod-

ern man for Baudelaire . . . is the man who tries to invent himself” (1997g, p.
311). Foucault endorses this modernist attitude, and he connects it with a philo-
sophical attitude or ethos that goes back to the Enlightenment and that can be
described as a “work carried out by ourselves upon ourselves as free beings”
(p. 316) and “a patient labor giving form to our impatience for liberty ” (p.
319).

Foucault thus commits himself to “modernism” but what is new is his as-

sociation of Baudelaire with Kant. Foucault sides explicitly with the modern
philosophical attitude Kant displays in his essays on Enlightenment and the
French Revolution (see esp., Foucault 1994). In these essays, according to
Foucault, Kant does not reduce contemporary events to universal truths but
questions the present as such in an “ontology of the present.” Foucault thus
makes it clear that a practicing of the modern attitude as he sees it is not lim-
ited to the domain of art, as was the case for Baudelaire. Like Kant, Foucault’s
own concern about freedom is much broader. “Baudelaire does not imagine
that [this ascetic elaboration of the self] has a place in society itself or in the
body politic” (p. 312). For Foucault, to take care of oneself is inextricably
linked with questioning “domination at every level and in every form in which
it exists, whether political, economic, social, institutional or what have you”
(1997b, pp. 300–301). Foucault introduces the Baudelairean type of modern-
ism to disconnect modernism and ‘humanism’, so as to be able to declare him-
self a modernist thinker. But at the same time, he widens and transforms the
Baudelairean attitude so that he can side with the project of the Enlightenment
in its striving towards freedom for all.

William Connolly (1998) has argued that Foucault’s emphasis on the con-

tingency of any self-understanding implies a normativity he calls “ethical
sensibility,” that is, a respect for the (self-understanding of) others. But he
concludes that because agonistic respect is central to Foucault’s thinking on
politics, this must extend even to respect for every sort of fundamentalist. I
think, however, that we can conclude the opposite. Foucault’s interpretation
of contingent self-understandings may imply a pluralism when it comes to
ethos, but his “normative modernist” commitment sets limits to their content:

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a Nazi ethos, for instance, is excluded. One moral code can be distilled from
the later Foucault’s work, namely, freedom for all persons for self-creation.

Beauvoir and Foucault, then, in spite of major differences between their

overall theoretical frameworks, both appear to embrace the idea of ethics as
an art of living that is thoroughly political in its commitment to freedom for
all.

Towards a post-existentialism

How can the concept of ethics as the “art of living oriented to freedom for
all” fill in the hiatus in postmodern thinking with respect to ethics and poli-
tics? What can we use from the theoretical frameworks of Beauvoir and
Foucault?

First, to supplement Beauvoir’s notion of freedom, we need Foucault’s idea

of the “practices of freedom.” Beauvoir always talked about situated freedom,
and against Sartre, she argued that freedom per se always has a social compo-
nent. In her view, we are ontologically free but our social position determines
whether we can realize our freedom (Vintges 1996). At the same time, how-
ever, this means she continued to accept Sartre’s concept of ontological free-
dom – a pure freedom that supposedly defines every human existence, waiting
only to be realized. And on just this point, the later Foucault’s radical socio-
historical approach to freedom is preferable. For him freedom is neither ab-
solute nor pure. It is embedded in social discourses and vocabularies that offer
tools for a care of the self. The practices of the self are “not something in-
vented by the individual himself. They are models that he finds in his culture
and are proposed, suggested, imposed upon him by his culture, his society,
and his social group” (Foucault 1997b, p. 291).

Foucault thus reconciles anti-essentialist postmodern thinking on the one

hand and thinking in terms of freedom on the other. For him it is crucial that,
instead of being lived by political structures, we should live and make poli-
tics ourselves. But his concept of a creative subject is not the humanist one.
Foucault disliked the work of Sartre: although Sartre emphasized that the self
is not given to us “through the moral notion of authenticity, he turns back to
the idea that we have to be ourselves – to be truly our true self” (1997c, p.
262). However, we have seen that the normative nucleus of Foucault’s later
work comes very close to French existentialism’s appeal to people to live as
free individuals and to commit themselves through action in the world, striv-
ing toward freedom for all. Foucault as well as Beauvoir and Sartre share with
cultural “modernism” its awareness of life’s inescapable contingency and of

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the need for us to invent ourselves. However, they all break with the Baudelairean
conception of art as a separate domain. Beauvoir explicitly dismisses Oscar
Wilde’s dandyism and surrealist writer Anaïs Nin’s “aestheticism.” She criti-
cizes them for making the beauty of their own lives the main focus (Beauvoir
1988/1972, pp. 165, 170). Sartre considers Baudelaire’s dandyism as infan-
tile and narcissistic: Baudelaire locked himself in an artificial world; instead
he should have acted in the real one (Sartre 1972/1946 ). As we have seen,
Foucault likewise widens ‘the modern attitude’, using the language of art not
to indicate a domain, separate from the real world, but to indicate that ethics
is a creative process. In this respect Foucault’s thinking on ethics can be la-
belled a post-existentialism, combining postmodern thinking and existential-
ism in an inspiring way.

Second, however, we need to connect Foucault’s concept of ethics as the

art of living with Beauvoir’s own, for hers is superior in that it has a place for
the emotions. In contrast with Sartre, she sees emotion as the positive experi-
ence through which we have contact with the world and our fellow human
beings. Not being able to experience emotion handicaps us to that we cannot
become “psycho-physiological unities” (Beauvoir 1953, p. 33), that is, incar-
nated human beings living in the midst of a social world (Vintges 1996).

In Beauvoir’s philosophical framework, then, one finds both phenomen-

ological sensitivity to our always being situated and incarnated beings as well
as the insistence that pure consciousness is also an element of our human
condition – indeed, the element that separates us from ourselves and from other
people. For Beauvoir, incarnation and pure consciousness are the two sides
of our ambiguous condition, and their reconciliation comes by way of a moral
conversion through which one becomes an incarnate pure consciousness, in-
volving oneself with others (Beauvoir 1948). Yet the pure, empty conscious-
ness always remains, which is why the moral conversion has to be practised
as a révolution permanente, and why there will never be complete harmony
between people, as Beauvoir emphasizes in The Second Sex (1984/1949).

In her conception of moral practice, Beauvoir thus underscores the impor-

tance of emotional life and our feelings of interpersonal and social symbiosis
– something neither Foucault nor his cold Greeks and Stoics ever really did.

13

Their shared preoccupation is self-mastery, above all in the sense of coping
with their sexual desires. They only deal with emotion from the point of view
of repression and sublimation. Beauvoir’s central concern is rather the more
general and multifaceted one of handling deep feelings for other persons. In
her essay on Sade, she opposes Stoicism explicitly, accusing Sade of “dark
stoicism” (a “negative version” of stoicism, says the French original), and she
concludes that we need a more positive ethic than the Stoic “serenity of the

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ancient sage who regarded as futile ‘things which do not depend on our-
selves’ ” – which is nothing but “a completely negative self-defense against
possible suffering” (1953, p. 77). In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Stoicism is said
to have “preached indifference” (1948, p. 29) and “impugned the ties of fam-
ily, friendship, and nationality so that they recognized only the universal form
of man” (p. 144). For Beauvoir, on the contrary, the whole point of ethics is
our choosing to become connected and emotionally involved with other peo-
ple, and of course care for others is much more prominent in this view.

14

Beauvoir pities Sade for his “emotional separatism” (1953, p. 42) and for his
being incapable of “emotional intoxication” (p. 33). His cruelty is mere com-
pensation for “this ‘autism’ which prevented him from ever forgetting him-
self or being genuinely aware of the reality of the other person” (p. 33). Hence,
“with a serenity similar to Kant’s and which has its source in the same puri-
tan tradition, De Sade conceives the free act only as an act free of all feeling.
If it were to obey emotional motives, it would make us nature’s slaves again
and not autonomous subjects” (p. 78).

In short, I want to put forward a post-existentialist conception of ethics as

the art of living – a conception that combines the best of the theoretical frame-
works of Beauvoir and Foucault and that thereby offers us an opportunity to
rethink ethics and politics “through” postmodernism. I call my conception
“post-existentialism” because it radically situates freedom; but it is also exis-
tentialist because it urges a certain unification of the self through a stylisa-
tion of acting in the world that involves a commitment to some basic values
and therefore to an identity. As such it would restore political agency.

Postmodernists have often stated that any identity is repressive, because it

always excludes parts of the self and other people. Personal identity thus having
become suspicious, identity on a collective level – for instance, of the gay,
black, or women’s movements – became suspicious, too. Every unification is
seen as repression and violence. Personal identity represses heterogeneity
within ourselves; and collective identity represses otherness. The only solu-
tion then seems to be to refuse – and thus “go beyond” – identity. But the ques-
tion will not go away: if every unification, intra- and intersubjective, is already
repressive, who is going to make politics and how? Is it really impossible to
develop institutional alternatives to Western democracies – societies that, from
the point of view of difference, stand revealed as the power practices of a spe-
cific group (Young 1990; Kymlicka 1998; Williams 1998)? Can there really
be no politics of the “recognition of identities,” as distinct from a “politics of
redistribution” (Taylor 1994)?

Here the later Foucault and Simone de Beauvoir both have something to

contribute. For they make us think of identity as a moral and political com-

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mitment, instead of as a pre-given essence. As such they give us a clue for a
type of identity politics that is not based on essence but on freely taking re-
sponsibility for certain values and norms. Too many Foucaultians find in his
work only the image of the nomadic self that escapes, when in fact his later
work is about taking responsibility and making basic moral commitments – a
contribution to political philosophy that has thus far remained under-theorized
(e.g., in Simons 1995; Moss 1998).

In my view, the time has come to rethink the postmodernist project from

such a perspective. We need a new conception of political agency, and not only
for reasons of collective identity politics. To urge an ethics of a care of the
self is first of all about empowerment, for it is to advocate a way of life in
which people have a grip on their personal lives. Second, such an ethics con-
ceives identity in a way that is important politically in the narrower sense of
the term, for it enables people to defend and enlarge the space of freedom
practices against and within the disciplines in our societies and against other
types of domination.

15

Third, we are not yet finished with the politics of redistribution – includ-

ing one on a global level – nor with identity politics. Women still have to fight
for – and not only against – many things, as do many other Others. If Foucault’s
final work is, as I have suggested, about political agency, it is also about re-
entering the sphere of social and political so-called identity movements, but
now with an ethos – and thus not falling into the trap of merely endorsing the
existing disciplinary identities. For example, “what the gay movement needs
now is much more the art of life. . . . I am sure that from the point of depar-
ture of our ethical choices, we can create something that will have a certain
relationship to gayness” (Foucault 1997d, pp. 163–164; also 1997e, pp. 156–
160).

In my view, Foucault’s position here can be extrapolated to the women’s

movement. When asked about the possibility of a gay movement Foucault
replied “we have to work at becoming homosexuals, and not be obstinate in
recognizing that we are” (1997f: 136). Likewise I would argue that it’s about
time the women’s movement takes responsibility again for a certain set of
values.

16

Foucauldians have argued that the later Foucault advocates a model of

guerrilla warfare tactics: Always avoid the trap of identity. Always attack
another target, always from another place. I have been arguing on the con-
trary that Foucault ultimately contributes to the reinstalling of political agency
and political commitment in postmodernism. “Must we burn Foucault?” I asked,
paraphrasing Beauvoir’s essay on Sade. Both authors, Sade and Foucault, were
attacking ‘humanism’ in its theoretical and abstract-moral assumptions. Both

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were trying to illuminate another type of reality. For Beauvoir, “the supreme
value of [Sade’s] testimony is the fact that it disturbs us” (1953, p. 89). We
cannot, however, “be satisfied with the solution he offers. . . . He did not sup-
pose that there could be any possible way other than individual rebellion. He
knew only two alternatives: abstract morality and crime. He was unaware of
action” (p. 87). Unlike Sade, Foucault did leave a positive ethics, one that can
be inspiring to us disciplined yet fragmented people of today. What started
with Foucault as a challenge ended as a real ethics, a point that was overlooked
by his main critics, as well as by his postmodernist interpreters.

Notes

*

I am indebted to Robert Scharff for his excellent editing, to my students for our discus-
sions on the topic of this article, and to Nancy Bauer, Ineke van der Burg, Annemie
Halsema, and Veronica Vasterling for valuable comments on a previous version.

1.

I use the term “postfeminism” for postmodern feminist theory that deconstructs the subject
woman and concentrates on the differences between women. For an overview, see Vintges
(1991, 1999).

2.

For an overview of this debate see Kelly (1994).

3.

McNay (1992, 1994). With the exception of McNay and Sawicki (1998), feminist ap-
propriations of Foucault have thus far concentrated on his works from the mid-seven-
ties (e.g., Hekman 1996; Diamond 1988).

4.

Beavoir writes: “[T]o regard de Sade’s peculiarities as simple facts is to misunderstand
their meaning and implication. They are always charged with an ethical significance.
. . . Sade’s eroticism ceased to be merely an individual attitude. It was also a challenge
for society” (Beauvoir 1953, p. 41). Beauvoir uses the term, “ethical,” here in the early
Sartrean sense, i.e., as an equivalent of “projet” or self-creation. At the end of her essay
on Sade where she criticizes him for not offering any ethical solution, Beauvoir employs
her own concept of ethics (see Section II).

5.

In Beauvoir’s view, “his emotional nature and the peculiar character of his sexuality are
for us data we can merely note . . . . [Sade] did not restrict himself to a passive submis-
sion to the consequences of his early choices. His chief interest for us lies not in his
aberrations, but in the manner in which he assumed responsibility for them” (Beauvoir
1953, p. 13).

6.

1997b, p. 282. “For what is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious (réfléchie)
practice of freedom? . . . Freedom is the ontological condition of ethics. But ethics is
the considered form that freedom takes when it is informed by reflection” (p. 284).

7.

Would the young Sartre regard an explicitly ethical attitude as “bad faith”, it is “bad
politics” to the older Sartre (Vintges 1996).

8.

Here the term “modernism” refers to an intellectual and artistic movement from roughly
the 1860’s to the mid-20th century. For a tracing of these “modernist” sources of
postmodernism, see Taylor (1989).

9.

1997b, p. 298. Foucault describes domination as follows: “When an individual or social
group succeeds in blocking a field of power relations, immobilizing them and prevent-

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ing any reversibility of movement by economic, political, or military means, one is faced
with what may be called a state of domination. In such a state, it is certain that practices
of freedom do not exist or exist only unilaterally or are extremely constrained and lim-
ited . . . liberation is sometimes the political or historical condition for a practice of free-
dom” (Foucault 1997b, p. 283).

10. If this is the case, it might be interesting to see what traces we can find in history of the

self-techniques of women. My Philosophy as Passion (1996) contributes to this wider
project, yet to be worked out.

11. For a lucid comparison of the three articles, see Schmidt and Wartenberg (1994).
12. See note 8. Baudelaire “defines modernity as ‘the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contin-

gent.’ But, for him, being modern . . . lies in adopting a certain attitude with respect to
this movement . . . that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the present mo-
ment” (Foucault 1997g, p. 311).

13. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca were among Foucault’s favourite writers (Eribon 1989;

Guibert 1990).

14. “[G]enerosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less dis-

tinction there is between the other and ourselves and the more we fulfil ourselves in taking
the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to others” (1948, p.
144).

15. “It takes an identity to say no,” commented the Dutch lawyer Heikelien Verrijn Stuart

on Dutch television coverage of a recent report on the Dutch military behavior in
Srebrenica in 1995 in the former Yugoslavia. Before the eyes of the Dutch thousands of
Moslem men were separated from the women and children. Seven thousand men are still
missing.

16. Elsewhere I will try to elaborate the outlines of what I would call a “normative post-

feminism.”

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