Bare Life, State of Exception, Sovereign Power: are those Concepts really Useful for a Critical Appraisal of Medical Practice ?
Résumé
In Homo Sacer, Agamben raises medical issues beyond the case of experimentation by nazis doctors. He says that “The physician and the scientist move in the no-man’s-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate” (HS p.172 / 91). He discusses the case of brain death, “purely bare life” (ibid., p.178/94), “ransom of new life-support technology” (HS p.173/92), “no man' s land between coma and death” (ibid., p.174/92), but “ideal condition for the removal of organs” “without being liable of homicide” (ibid.,p.175/93). Already in Means without ends (MSF, 1995), Agamben denounced the decisive function “of medical-scientific ideology within the system of power (…).That same drawing of naked life that, in certain circumstances, the sovereign used to be able to exact from the forms of life is now massively and daily exacted by the pseudoscientific representations of the body, illness, and health, and by the "medicalization" of ever-widening spheres of life and of individual imagination” (MSF 18-19 / 18). Therefore, it would be interesting to test the concepts which he put in debate and linked together, -bare life, sovereign power, and state of exception-, as tools for critical analysis of contemporary medicine. I will not adress this issue in a general way, but through the magnifying glass provided by a very small field, the medical termination of pregnancy (medical TOP).
Domaines
PhilosophieOrigine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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