Let us take as an example the over-investment in the body which characterizes our contemporaneity. For a few decades, the focus on the subject has been shifted from psychic intimacy to the body itself. Today, the self is the body. Subjectivity has been reduced to the body, to its appearance, its image, its performance, its health, its longevity. The predominance of the bodily dimension in the constitution of identity allows for talk of a bio-identity. We no longer face a body made docile by disciplinary institutions, a body striated by the panoptical machine, the body of the factory, the army, the school. Today in gyms or in cosmetic surgery clinics, everyone voluntarily submits him or herself to an ascesis following the scientific and aesthetic precept. This is also what Francisco Ortega, following Foucault, calls bioascesis. On the one hand, we find the adequation of the body to the norms of show business, according to the celebrity-type format. Given the infinite possibilities to transform the body genetically, chemically, and electronically, the obsession for physical perfection, and the compulsion of the self to arouse the other’s desire, even at the cost of one’s own well-being, ultimately substitutes the promised erotic satisfaction with a self-imposed mortification. The fact is that we voluntarily embrace the tyranny of a perfect body in favor of a sensorial enjoyment whose immediacy makes the suffering undergone even more surprising. Bioascesis is a care of the self, but different from the ancients, whose care was directed at the good life, something which Foucault also called an aesthetics of existence. Our care aims at the body itself, its longevity, health, beauty, good shape, scientific and aesthetic happiness, or what Deleuze would call fat-dominant health. We shall not hesitate in calling it, even under the modulating conditions of contemporary coercion, a fascist body — in face of such an unattainable model a large part of the population is thrown into a condition of sub-human inferiority. Moreover, in the domain of biosociality the body becomes an information packet, a genetic reservoir, a statistical dividual (I belong to the group of the hypertensive, of HIV-AIDS, etc.), which only heightens the risks of eugenics. That any weekly magazine with its health, beauty, sex, and nutrition slogans are adopted happily as scientific precepts, and therefore, as imperatives, only illustrates this context. We are, in any case, surrounded by the register of a biologized life.… While identified to the mere body, to the excitable and manipulable body, from show business to the moldable body, we are reduced to the domain of bare life. We continue in the sphere of the afterlife, of the mass production of 'survivors' in the broad sense of the term.
