The Notion of Experience in the History of Sexuality: political and educational implications

Abstract

This essay deals with the problem of experience in the third period of Michel Foucault’s work, taking as its main source the first three volumes of the History of Sexuality. It analyses the place of experience as a structuring category of the work, and of the French intellectual’s thinking, showing the constitutively political character of this elaboration and possible developments to conceive human education. Experience is conceived as a way of relating to oneself that implies the transformation of oneself, based on a slow artisanal elaboration of one’s own existence, based on the relationship with the Other, which makes it possible to conceive human education from the ethical-aesthetic-political constitution of the subject in this relationship.