Absence and subjection to the present: on the ontology of these times in Michel Foucault

Abstract

The irrecusable consolidation of an expansion-consumption-tolerance regime rectifies every symbolic manifestation of the present in a common life. The symptoms of today's civilization of consumption, in subjectivities and in their bodies, sum up the composition of suitable orders - of individual and collective relations - under the signs of economic development, legal guarantees, vulgar erotomania, and banal liberalities; who have magnetized themselves, minions, at all levels of experience and culture in the present time. The present signs and codes of a kind of generalized indifference convolve all the complex structures and performances of power into increasingly precise scripts, upon which the desubstantiation of reality and the experiences of a paroxysmal absence become ontologically imprinted. In our attempt to analyze and unleash the new reality of technology, control and consumption without locks, we will evoke the last Foucault, who formulates - in the synthesis of an original ontology of the present - the prospect of possible new ethical dispositions of the subjects and their bodies, specifically by updating a singular aesthetization of their own existences.