This article interprets Foucault’s life-long involvement with transgressive experiences as an art of not being oneself, an effort to escape identity & become other. By bringing together Foucault’s own theoretical practices with those drawn from Deleuze & Blanchot, & linking these with biographical material, the author shows how Foucault’s `encounters’ with passion & pleasure in film, philosophy, S/M, drugs, the Greeks & suicide amount to an `art of living,’ or what Foucault more precisely called an `ethics’ – an immanent ethics in which one becomes worthy of what happens to oneself by becoming a work of art. (37 refs)