Oana Șerban
Abstract
Conceived as an analysis of the reception of Nietzsche`s ethics, assumed as a project for
an aesthetic of existence, at the crossroads of modernism and postmodernism, this article explores
the way in which the whole art of living could be interpreted following two significant moments:
the “death of God”, proposed by Nietzsche, and the “death of the Author”, mentioned by Michel
Foucault. More precisely, I investigate the way in which the two moments will test common
assumptions exploited in different philosophical directions. In this regard, I suggest understanding
the manner in which the death of God develops philosophy as an art of transfiguration, endowed
with a metaphysical nostalgia meant to influence Foucault`s perspectivism and genealogy.
This paper is an attempt to criticize the modern subject – considered through the theme of
the selfhood – and the ascetic ideal as elements submitted to the art of living that Foucault
inherited from Nietzsche. Thus, I advocate for the development of Nietzsche`s ascetic ideal
assumed as part of the aesthetics of the existence in which self-denial suggests not only a dynamic
conception of discipline, achieved through the equivalence between giving life a meaning and
surviving to the weakness, but also a narrative method, dramatized, of opening the subject as an
exponent of consciousness. I assume the fact that such a statement proposes accepting a subject
consisted in the heritage of “morality of mores” practices, from Nietzsche`s construction,
resignificated by Foucault in his “practices of the self”. This kind of approach seems to present
the impasse of the aesthetics of existence caused by the perennial returning at a model of ascetic
ideal, adjusted, upgraded, in such a form that modernity is announced, in the light of this
movement, as a dimension consacrated to the constituing of the self as a work of art tributary to
ethical reforms of the art of living.