Theorizing existential meanings: Culture as way of life and the ‘late style’ of Michel Foucault

After his iconic studies of modern systems of thought and power, Michel Foucault abruptly refocused attention to ancient ‘cultures of the self’. Whether this sharp turn was denounced as insidiously neoliberal, or extolled as emancipatory ‘arts of self-fashioning’, the responses centred the ‘self’ for decades to come. In the meantime, the much-delayed publications of his later works allow for resituation of their significance beyond such typifications. This paper shifts emphasis from ‘self’ to ‘culture’, which Foucault not only explicitly redefined in ontological and axiological terms as social ethos but functionalized as intersubjective therapeutic practice and as a missing ‘hinge’ that links self to power. This definition explores what culture accomplishes existentially rather than what it is symbolically, and reconnects ‘forms’ of first-person experience to larger, ‘trans-historical’ themes of good life. This sociologically useful vocabulary underwrites what, following Edward Said, we call Foucault's ‘late style’.