“I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.”

Michel Foucault

practices of freedom, practices of liberation

I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation … I am not trying to say that liberation as such, or this or that form of liberation, does not exist: when a colonized people attempts to liberate itself from its colonizers, this is indeed a practice of liberation in the strict sense. But we know very well, and moreover, in this specific case, that this practice of liberation is not in itself sufficient to define the practices of freedom that will still be needed if this people, this society, and these individuals are to be able to define admissible and acceptable forms of existence or political society. This is why I emphasize practices of freedom over processes of liberation; again, the latter have their place, but they do not seem to me to be capable by themselves of defining all the practical forms of freedom. … liberation paves the way for new power relationships, which must be controlled by practices of freedom.

Michel Foucault (‘The ethic of the concern of the self as a practice of freedom’ in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth)