Towards a New Aesthetic: Paradigm Ethico-aesthetics and the Aesthetics of Existence in Foucault and Guattari

Felix Guattari’s and Michel Foucault’s works on the production ofsubjectivity investigate the transversal relations of social, political, andecological bodies in their biopolitical constitution. Both authors, mostprominently in their late works after 1980, write in opposition to theconservative backlash that has come to dominate institutionalizingforms of enclosure and impositions of legitimized and impoverishedforms of subjectivity.1 For them, the production of subjectivity becomesthe very existential territory on which social, ethical, and aesthetictransformations must be negotiated. The subject—or rather a processualsubjectivity—becomes the machinic foyer out of which new and moretransversal accounts of the socius can be developed. These processes relyon practices of self-governance, forms of practices of the self, and modesof constitution of the subject which are recurrent features of Foucault’slate writings on the care for the self and Guattari’s deliberations on a“new aesthetic paradigm.”