Voluntary Submission and the Aesthetics of Form: Foucault, Robbe-Grillet, and the Creative Reconfiguration of Power

Cristian Gonzalez Arevalo (University of Freiburg, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA))

Graduate Panel 1

Voluntary Submission and the Aesthetics of Form: Foucault, Robbe-Grillet, and the Creative Reconfiguration of Power 

Cristian González Arévalo (University of Freiburg) 

Abstract: This paper examines voluntary submission as a crucial yet under-theorised problem in Michel Foucault’s legacy. While Foucault’s analyses of power have often been read through the lenses of discipline, governmentality, resistance, and critique, less attention has been paid to the ways in which subjects actively bind themselves to relations of power and participate in the formation of their own subjection. Against readings that reduce submission either to domination or to simple consent, this paper argues that voluntary submission should be understood as an aesthetic-performative practice of self-formation. The argument proceeds by rethinking aesthetics beyond the philosophy of beauty or the theory of art. Drawing on Foucault’s writings on visibility, painting, and the aesthetics of existence, aesthetics is approached here as the organisation of sensibility: the configuration of bodies, gestures, gazes, scenes, and forms of experience. From this perspective, voluntary submission appears not as passivity, but as a situated practice through which subjects expose themselves, assume constraints, and transform power relations from within. The paper then stages a dialogue between Foucault’s reflections on S/M, theories of performativity, and the literary aesthetics of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman, with its suspension of psychological interiority, moral explanation, and stable narrative meaning, offers a model for thinking form as a device that produces experience rather than merely represents it. This model helps clarify Foucault’s claim that S/M can function as a “creative enterprise”: not because it liberates a hidden sexual truth, but because it invents scenes in which power, pleasure, obedience, and resistance become visible, reversible, and available for transformation. By linking voluntary submission to aesthetic form, this paper proposes a renewed reading of Foucault’s legacy: one in which freedom is not opposed to self-binding, but emerges through historically situated practices that reorganise the very conditions of subjectivation.

Bio: Cristian González Arévalo is an Argentine legal scholar specialising in the philosophy of law. He is currently pursuing PhDs in Philosophy at the University of Freiburg and in Law at the University of Buenos Aires. His work focuses on Michel Foucault’s thought, critical theory and contemporary French philosophy, with particular attention to questions of power, resistance and subjectivation in legal and political contexts. He has undertaken research stays at Université Paris 8 and at the Michel Foucault Archives, and has presented his work at conferences in Europe and the United States.

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