Biopolitics and the Dressage of Populations

Macmillan, Alexandre

doi:10.4000/conflits.17959

Cited by 7 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Unlike anatomo‐politics, biopolitics is interested not in individual bodies, but in managing the social body or “populations” (i.e., birth rates, death rates and quality of life) (Foucault, ). Biopolitical power massifies in order to control “a multiplicity of individuals too large to be thoroughly controlled” (Foucault, ; Macmillan, , pp. 52–53, original translation).…”

Section: Foucault and Bio‐powermentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding human enhancement technologies through critical phenomenology

2018

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Human enhancement technologies raise serious ethical questions about health practices no longer content simply to treat disease, but which now also propose to “optimize” human beings’ physical, cognitive and psychological abilities. These technologies call for a reassessment of our relationship to health, the human body and the body's organic, identity and social functions. In nursing, such considerations are in their infancy. In this paper, we argue for the relevance of critical phenomenology as a way to better understand the ethical issues related to human enhancement technologies (HET). In so doing, we seek to problematize HET and assess their influence on the future development of nursing science and practice. It is difficult to anticipate the concrete effects of HET, we suggest, because these practices reconfigure the meaning of normativity and disorient our conventional ethical landscape. In this context, we argue that the later work of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault invites a critical perspective into how techno‐scientific discourses modify our relationship to care, to health and to our own social and corporeal identities. Despite the traditional philosophical opposition between phenomenology and critical theory, we maintain that a hybrid critical phenomenological approach opens new ways to assess the integration of technology and practice. Our analysis understands HET as a process of “hybridization” between technological objects and human subjects. Critical phenomenology thus effectively questions anthropocentric definitions of technology, challenges the dichotomy between curative treatment and enhancement and, finally, prompts valuable reflection on the implications of HET for nursing theory and practice.

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Section: Foucault and Bio‐powermentioning

confidence: 99%