The theme of the creation of the self as a work of art is recurrent in Michel Foucault’s reflection. Conceiving the care of the self as the practice of freedom, he was interested in the techniques that allow individuals to shape their own lives in a creative way. However, he is critical about the minoritarian movements for the affirmation of identities as they risk recreating normalizing modes of subjectification that prevent genuine experimentation. In this lecture, we will contextualize Foucault’s considerations within the emergence of neoliberal governmental technologies and the new way in which they organize the field of the construction of the self. In particular, we will look at the theory of human capital and we will try to understand how it has been evolving since. We will interrogate the way in which individual identity is shaped in social media and chase the difference between the construction of the self as a personal brand and the creation of the self as a work of art.
Anna Longo is a philosopher living and working in Paris. She is program director at the Collège international de philosophie and affiliated to the LCSP at University Paris Cité. She has been researching at the crossroad of aesthetics, philosophy of technologies and contemporary metaphysics. Her last book are Le jeu de induction: automatization de la connaissance et réflexion philosophique (Mimesis 2022) and Deleuze, une philosophie de la multiplicité (Ellipses 2024).
