Perverse Book Two: Perverse Relational Cinematic Afterlife

By Andy Pink

In an interview for the French magazine, Gai Pied, entitled "Friendship as a Way of Life," Foucault, in an echo of Deleuze, announces that theory must invent new forms of life and experimental modes of relationship. The purpose of theory is to "invent," as Foucault says, "a manner of being that is still improbable." Invention in this process is key: it is both a theory and a practice. Theoretically, extant ideas and novel concepts must compete for ascendance in the emergent theoretical tradition. Practically, theory must be inserted into everyday activities, such as friendship. But what is a "manner of being"?Foucault does not explicitly address this question, but the gist of his words is an aesthetic or an art (what he elsewhere refers to as "the care of the self") of existence. Nietzsche situates the entirety of his philosophical efforts in the aestheticization of existence: to find the comedy and the tragedy of everyday life. Foucault's critique of the institutional structures, such as the school, the family, the prison and so on that produce the extant styles of life, heralds the nietzschean overman, or the deleuzean nomad, who resists the imago of oedipus and his will to agency, intention, will, authority, mastery, and knowledge. Foucault's gesture toward otherness in everyday practice is a variant of the "yes, yes" that I foresee in posthumanist and post-individualist efforts to imagine a subject after its death. This project -- to invent the overman or the nomad or the friend -- is an affirmative indication toward a displacement of the traditional imago of primary identification in the west that otherwise structures theory and practice. Foucault's pursuit of the discovery of alternative imagos involves restructuring the images of the self, or of the ideological constructions that identify and reproduce the portrait of the je ("I") in society. The subject must replace identification with the name of the father for a different style of primary idealization.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0BYGT38NK
• ISBN13: 9798387018084
• Release Date: March 2023
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 156 Pages
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.4" x 5.0"