Ethopoiesis: Foucault’s Late Ethics and the Sublime Body

This paper argues that Neil Hertz’s model of the sublime turn allows us to perceive the aesthetic, and specifically literary, consequences of Foucault’s late ethics reimagined as a sublime poetics. In doing so, the present analysis attempts to reanimate the concept of the sublime as a powerful ethical category reconceiving the subject in terms of the acts of writing that structure a constitutive aesthetic relationship to her own body. More generally, this account of Foucault proposes that his late ethics, and not necessarily the politics of his earlier work, holds the most interest for literary critics, since these ideas explicitly rethink ethics as a poetics, and thus foreground the frequently underrecognized force of literary creation, and not simply cultural representation, in shaping subjects of power.