Paper short abstract:

After introducing the idea of an ethical project, this presentation focuses on one particular example involving students at a yoga school in South India who, by the use of techniques of asana (pose), attempt to dissolve the self and, in so doing, cultivate a particular form of ethical subjectivity.

Paper long abstract:

In his later works Foucault characterized ethics as the relationship one establishes with oneself or, alternately formulated, the various ways in which the individual seeks to constitute him or herself as a particular kind of ethical subject. While the Ancient Greek ethics described by Foucault is strongly teleological and characterized by a high degree of personalism (the cultivation of self-mastery), the ethical project pursued by students at a yoga school in Southern India is much more focused on techniques which, although understood to operate on each individual separately, are employed as part of a collective undertaking. In this presentation I first introduce the idea of an ethical project as an explicit, collective, and teleological form of action that persons take up in their efforts to transform themselves and the worlds they inhabit. I then turn to consider the particular project that students at a yoga school in Southern India are engaged in. I suggest that the ultimate goal (teleology) of this project is an effect of asana (postural) practice that the guru of the school describes as "getting rid of the I" but which can also be understood as a particular form of self-effacement or ego-dissolution. Through a series of ethnographic observations I will show how asana practice serves as a means to accomplish this goal and, in so doing provides a tool of ethical reflection and self-cultivation.