Dream and the aesthetics of existence: Revisiting “Foucault’s ethical imagination”

Abstract

For the later Foucault, as for the early Foucault, the dream represents a privileged disclosure of the ethics of the self, and the relation to truth. What, then, is the function of the dream in the ethics of the self? This article brings together Foucault’s early work on the dream and his late work on the care of the self to answer this question. Foucault’s archeologies and genealogies of power and discourse show how the modern disciplinary, bio-political, neo-liberal individual is constituted simultaneously as self-sovereign and as subject to governmental management. The dream awakens when the self-sovereign subject of modern power goes to sleep. The dream, then, problematizes and displaces the sovereign subject and opens the door to disruptive forms of experience, counter to modern power’s demand that we be always awake, productive, and in control of our thoughts and feelings.