Christopher Marlowe – Doctor Faustus

• Theme: Hubris, forbidden knowledge, damnation, and the erotic pull of transgression.

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

In Doctor Faustus, the tragic descent of a man who trades his soul for knowledge reveals the very mechanisms Foucault seeks to unveil in his genealogy of subjectivity: not simply the content of thought, but how we are made subjects through our desire for knowledge and power.

Faustus, the archetypal Renaissance overreacher, incarnates the epistemo-erotic subject—one whose desire is not merely to know, but to master, dominate, transcend. His invocation of necromancy and his pact with Mephistopheles is less a Christian fable and more a dramatization of the transformation of truth into a mode of power. In Foucault’s words, “knowledge is not for knowing: knowledge is for cutting.”

Through Faustus, we witness the eroticization of the limit: he finds pleasure not simply in gaining knowledge, but in violating divine law. Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure reconfigures ancient ethics not as commandment but as askesis—the shaping of self through techniques of moderation. Faustus inverts this: his askesis becomes excessive. His technique is dissolution.

This is where Foucault’s late reflections in The Care of the Self grow especially poignant. Rather than cultivating an aesthetic life rooted in inner harmony, Faustus neglects the care of the soul, opting instead for intoxication through spectacle, illusions, and domination over others. His failure is not ignorance, but a perversion of ethical subjectivation: he crafts the self not as a work of art, but as a tool of self-destruction.

The pact with Lucifer dramatizes Foucault’s notion of subjectivation as both seduction and subjection. Faustus is simultaneously sovereign and slave—exercising his will, yet caught in the trap of a larger apparatus. The devils who serve him are not symbols of religious damnation alone; they also perform a Foucauldian function: technicians of desire, regulating his pleasures, crafting his punishments, orchestrating his time.

The climax—Faustus begging time to stop—becomes a Foucauldian rupture. For Foucault, modernity is obsessed with confession, with the revelation of truth through language. But Faustus cannot confess: he can only scream. His final words are not redemptive but diagnostic. They signal a soul who has become nothing but a function of power’s games—a warning of what happens when the will to know forgets the care of the self.

Thus, Doctor Faustus is more than tragedy. It is a theatre of the ethical abyss, where knowledge becomes vice, and liberty becomes a velvet shackle.