The Invention of the Self

'For Foucault there is then a modern "asceticism of the dandy" who remains unsatisfied with his subjectivity-as-is (we might say with his life on the torus ("in the flux of passing moments")), and who thus "makes of his body, his behaviours, his feelings and passions, his very existence, a work of art.'

Michel Foucault's Ethics : Subjectivity and Truth

Simon O'Sullivan's On the Production of Subjectivity

'This self-invention arises from a decision made by the subject and a concomitant practice of living differently, against the norms of the world that such a subject is born in to (insofar as these norms tend to instigated by a transcendent enunciator, which again, in our own time, is Capital).'

Simon O'Sullivan's On the Production of Subjectivity

These quotations remind me of Kafka's short story "A Hunger Artist".