La Sylphide

• Choreography by Filippo Taglioni; music by Jean-Madeleine Schneitzhoeffer

• Context: Often cited as the first Romantic ballet; emphasizes supernatural themes and ethereal femininity through pointework and the figure of the sylph (a magical forest spirit).

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

With La Sylphide, Western ballet pivots from sovereign visibility (courtly power) to spectral interiority: an aesthetic shift that aligns perfectly with what Foucault, in The Order of Things, describes as the epistemic rupture between the Classical and the Modern. This ballet is not about order, taxonomy, and architectural spectacle—it is about dreams, longing, and the unreachable Other, especially as embodied by the feminized figure of the Sylph.

Foucault would immediately recognize La Sylphide as a discursive invention of desire. The sylph is not a character; she is a projection of the masculine subject’s fantasy, a codified figuration of the eroticized, unattainable ideal. She is the female body deterritorialized, transformed into vapor, suggestion, absence. This directly parallels the analysis in The Use of Pleasure, where Foucault describes the formation of ethical subjects through regulated desire—except here, the desire is romanticized, aestheticized, and placed onstage under the gaze of both audience and protagonist.

What distinguishes La Sylphide from earlier court ballets is the technologization of disappearance. Through the technical innovation of pointework, the ballerina seems to defy gravity, to exist on the threshold of presence and absence. Foucault would read this not as a naïve illusion, but as a technique of subjectivation—the dancer internalizes the ideal of bodily lightness, of corporeal transcendence, and performs it through rigorous physical control. In other words: the ethereal is produced through discipline.

Moreover, the ballet stages a clear regime of gendered embodiment. James, the male protagonist, is bound to the social world—duty, marriage, rationality. The Sylph, on the other hand, is pure affect, pure nature, pure escape. But this division, Foucault would argue, is not natural. It is a discursive arrangement, a deployment of sexuality (in The History of Sexuality terms), where the female body is idealized precisely to remain unreachable. She must die if she is touched.

In this sense, La Sylphide represents a sublimated form of erotic control. The desire it offers is never to be fulfilled—only aestheticized, disciplined, and mourned. The ballet teaches its audience not how to possess, but how to suffer beautifully.

From Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, we could say that James' fate is the result of a misrecognition of truth. He cannot distinguish between dream and freedom, between romantic escape and social constraint. His downfall is not a moral failure, but an epistemic one—he chooses the sylph (a form of truth that does not belong to the order of knowledge), and is punished by losing both her and the world.

Finally, Foucault would note that the ballet operates within a newly emerging bourgeois moral economy. It no longer praises virtue as in classical drama, nor celebrates sovereign order as in the baroque. Instead, it produces subjects who are alienated, aesthetic, and self-regulating. The spectators are taught not to obey the king, but to discipline their longing through spectacle.

Thus, La Sylphide becomes a hinge point: where ballet ceases to be a mirror of power and becomes a mirror of internalized desire. Its sylph is not a fairy—she is a symptom of a modern subjectivity emerging in the 19th century, torn between the rational and the ecstatic, between the social body and the flight of the self.