Kanadehon Chūshingura (The Treasury of Loyal Retainers) – Kabuki Theatre, Japan

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

Kanadehon Chūshingura dramatizes the historical event of the 47 rōnin, retelling the tale of samurai who avenge the death of their master and then take their own lives in a collective act of loyalty. Within the Kabuki framework—known for its stylized gesture, dramatic intensity, and spectacular visuals—this theatre work serves as a vibrant site where Foucault’s ideas on ethics as a practice of freedom, subjectivation, and technologies of the self are theatrically enacted.

According to The Care of the Self, ethics is not simply moral law or obedience to external norms, but a “mode of subjectivation,” a cultivated relationship to oneself. The rōnin do not merely obey the samurai code (bushidō) as an imposition of power; rather, they aesthetically form themselves as ethical subjects by ritually enacting revenge and performing self-sacrifice with precision, resolve, and theatrical grandeur. Their lives become a stage for the “aestheticization of existence,” in which loyalty is not just a duty, but an inner discipline and a poetic gesture.

The theatrical excess of Kabuki—costuming, mie poses, vocal expression—does not trivialize this ethical practice but reveals, in Foucauldian terms, the stylization of life as a work of art. It dramatizes the tension between social law and ethical self-fashioning. The 47 rōnin do not die as pawns of shogunal authority but as self-determining subjects who, through their act, attain an ethically sculpted form of immortality. Their suicide, far from being a surrender, becomes a radical re-appropriation of subjectivity.

Thus, Kanadehon Chūshingura is not merely an action tragedy—it is a meditation on ethical subjectivity, a public pedagogy of how to care for the self within structures of power, custom, and spectacle. It teaches not submission to doctrine but how one might, in Foucault’s words, “become the subject of one’s own conduct.”