In the mid-1970s, Michel Foucault found himself in a strange position. He had just published the first volume of The History of Sexuality, a book that captured more than a decade of work on power, discipline, and biopolitics. By this point he had already revolutionised how we understand prisons, medicine, madness, and knowledge. He had shown that power is not simply something wielded from the top down, nor merely a negative force of prohibition. Instead, power is diffuse, productive, and immanent to social life itself.
And yet, after The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 appeared, there was silence. Not only from readers, but from Foucault himself. He stopped publishing in the series for nearly eight years. That pause wasn’t writer’s block - it was a moment of self-reckoning. Foucault began to suspect that his own analysis of power risked trapping him. By mapping power with such precision, by showing its ability to infiltrate every corner of social life, he worried he had given it too much weight. He had shown us how power works everywhere, but in doing so he left little space to imagine freedom, agency, or resistance.
If resistance so easily turns into another form of power, how might we rethink it after Foucault’s realization? How do we resist without simply mirroring what we oppose? And what if resistance is not a heroic rupture, but an ongoing practice of self-formation - what Foucault came to describe as an “aesthetics of existence”?
The Trap of Power
Most of Foucault’s work is dazzling in its descriptions of how power operates. In Discipline and Punish (1975), he showed how prisons, schools, hospitals, and barracks all share a logic of surveillance, discipline, and normalization. Power is not centralized in a sovereign figure who commands from above, but distributed across networks of institutions and practices. It works by training bodies, shaping desires, producing categories of normal and abnormal.
In The History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (1976), he extended this analysis, arguing that modern societies are defined by biopower: the management of populations through statistics, health campaigns, sexuality, reproduction, and hygiene. Here too, power is not just repression but production. Sexuality is not silenced - it is incited, studied, measured, confessed.
But there is a paradox. The more Foucault described the capillary reach of power, the more he risked affirming its omnipotence. His genealogies revealed how even the most intimate aspects of our lives - our pleasures, our confessions - are shot through with power relations. Yet in showing how deeply we are shaped, he left little room for how we might resist or transform ourselves.
This was not an abstract worry. Foucault was deeply engaged in political struggles - especially around prisons. In the early 1970s he co-founded the Prisons Information Group, working with activists, lawyers, and prisoners to push for reform. But he watched as the movement was quickly absorbed. Calls for more humane conditions became new techniques of control. Demands for transparency led to more efficient surveillance. What was meant to challenge the prison ended up reinforcing it.
A few years later, another experience reinforced this unease: Foucault’s fascination with the Iranian revolution. He traveled to Tehran in 1978, convinced that the uprising against the Shah represented not just a political revolt but the eruption of a new form of spirituality, a different way of imagining collective life. But the revolution soon hardened into theocratic rule, suppressing many of the freedoms it had promised. Foucault was widely criticized for his misjudgment, and the episode left a mark on his thinking. It underscored how resistance, even when it begins as a genuine break with the existing order, can be reabsorbed into new structures of domination. The lesson was sobering: power is not defeated once and for all; it mutates, adapts, and can turn the energy of revolt into its own resource.
Resistance, Foucault realized, can easily be co-opted. It can become another layer in the stratification of power, another gear in the machine. To critique power by mapping it in detail may risk simply extending its reach, as though power were the only thing that mattered.
The Turn to Ethics
It was in this context that Foucault began to reorient his work. He did not abandon the analysis of power, but he turned his attention to a new question: how might we think about freedom - not as an escape from power, but as something practiced within its field?
Beginning in the late 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, Foucault focused on ethics, subjectivity, and what he called the “care of the self.” He asked: how do people constitute themselves as subjects - not only as objects of knowledge and power, but as agents of their own lives? How do we fold norms into ourselves in ways that do not only constrain but also open possibilities?
This shift did not mean Foucault became an individualist or moralist. Quite the opposite. He argued that the self is never outside of power and knowledge. Subjectivity emerges in relation to them. The key question is not whether we can escape, but how we can transform those relations - how we can live otherwise.
His study of Greco-Roman ethics was not nostalgic. It was strategic. By looking at ancient practices of self-care - diets, sexual restraint, friendship, meditation - Foucault saw how individuals made their lives into projects. Ethics was not about obeying divine law or institutional authority. It was about subjectivation: the ongoing work of forming oneself. Life itself became a material to be shaped.
This is what Foucault meant by an “aesthetics of existence.” Just as an artist shapes stone into form, individuals could shape their lives into works of art. Not in the sense of self-indulgent lifestyle branding, but as deliberate, disciplined, experimental practices of freedom.
Resistance as Folding
One of Foucault’s most suggestive concepts here is “folding.” Borrowing from the Stoics and later taken up by Gilles Deleuze, folding describes how external codes and norms become internalized as forms of self-relation. A law, a discourse, a cultural script - these do not simply constrain us from outside. We fold them in. They become part of how we talk to ourselves, judge ourselves, and shape our actions. What we call the “inside” (subjectivity) is in fact an interiorized curve of the outside, a turning-back of power and knowledge that becomes the texture of subjectivity itself.
At first glance this might sound like power’s victory - an internalized policing of the self. But Foucault insisted it also opens a space for freedom. Because folding is not passive absorption. It is active stylization. When the Greeks practiced moderation, for example, they were not simply obeying rules. They were experimenting with how to relate to their pleasures, how to sculpt themselves into certain kinds of subjects.
Resistance, then, is not located outside power. It happens in the folds - where external norms are taken up, reworked, and redirected. Freedom is not liberation from all constraint, but the capacity to respond differently to those constraints, to bend them into new shapes.
Problematisation, Not Prohibition
This perspective reframes morality. We often think of ethics in terms of prohibition: rules that say yes or no. Foucault wanted us to think in terms of problematization: the ways cultures frame certain aspects of life as problems that demand reflection and self-formation.
Sexuality is a prime example. Rather than seeing it as a natural drive repressed by morality, Foucault showed how sexuality has always been a field of problematization. The Greeks, the Romans, the Christians - each developed ways of thinking about sexual conduct not just as permitted or forbidden acts, but as sites of ethical work.
For the Greeks, moderation and restraint were not imposed by divine law. They were practices through which free men crafted themselves. For Christians, sexual conduct became universalized as sin, to be confessed and governed by pastoral power. Both systems shaped subjectivity, but in different ways. The point is not to declare one freer than the other, but to see how each defined what it meant to be a subject.
In this sense, resistance is not about breaking rules but about re-problematizing. To ask of any norm: how do I take this up? What kind of self does it incite me to become? Can it be folded differently?
The Fourfold of Ethical Formation
In The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self, Foucault introduced a schema to analyze moral experience. He identified four dimensions:
Ethical substance: what part of ourselves is at stake - desires, intentions, acts?
Mode of subjection: by what authority or rationale do we bind ourselves - divine law, rational self-mastery, civic duty?
Ethical work: what practices do we undertake - meditation, diet, confession, friendship?
Telos: what mode of being do we aspire to - a virtuous citizen, a pure soul, an autonomous individual?
This framework makes ethics dynamic. It is not about static codes but about the interplay of substance, authority, practice, and aspiration. It is a map of how selves are formed, and how they might be re-formed.
For rethinking resistance, this is crucial. It shifts the focus from abstract opposition to concrete practices. Resistance becomes less about saying “no” to power in general, and more about reworking the ways we bind ourselves, the practices we undertake, and the ends we aim for.
Foucault’s turn to ethics was not a retreat from politics. It was a deepening of it. If power works by shaping subjectivity, then politics must also be about reshaping subjectivity - about cultivating ways of living that are not fully captured by dominant norms.
Resistance Today
What does all this mean for us, decades after Foucault’s pause? In a world of digital surveillance, algorithmic nudging, and self-optimization, the risk of resistance being co-opted is as high as ever. Movements for reform are quickly absorbed. Calls for authenticity become new marketing strategies. Even rebellion can be commodified.
But Foucault’s late thought offers resources. First, it reminds us that freedom is not an absolute escape. It is relational, situated, and practiced. Second, it suggests that ethics is inseparable from politics. How we live - how we fold norms into ourselves, how we practice self-care, how we relate to others - is already political. And third, it calls us to treat life itself as a site of experimentation.
Resistance, then, is not only protest in the streets (though it includes that). It is also the quieter work of crafting selves that do not simply mirror what power demands. It is in practices of friendship, dialogue, moderation, and care. It is in reclaiming time from the rhythms of optimization. It is in multiplying the possibilities of life.
Foucault’s reckoning after The History of Sexuality was not a retreat but a breakthrough. He realized that to critique power without thinking about freedom risks reproducing the very logic of domination. By turning to ethics, subjectivity, and the care of the self, he opened a new path: resistance as self-formation, as aesthetics of existence.
This does not mean the subject is sovereign or free from power. It means the subject is always in relation - to norms, to knowledge, to others - and that these relations can be folded differently. Freedom is not liberation from all constraints but the capacity to live otherwise within them.
To rethink resistance today is to see it not only in heroic acts but in the everyday work of crafting selves and communities that resist capture. It is to embrace problematization rather than prohibition, folding rather than obedience, experiment rather than purity. It is to take seriously the idea that our lives are not just given but made - and that in the making lies the possibility of transformation.
Join us at the new London School of Continental Philosophy in Barbican, London -where we’ll explore Foucault together through in-person seminar courses. Enrolments now open.