GOVERNARE LA SALUTE. MEDICINA E CURA DI SÉ IN CANGUILHEM E FOUCAULT

Abstract

This essay presents an analysis of the relationship between philosophy and medicine in the work of Michel Foucault, with particular attention to the influence of Canguilhem’s lesson. After an initial interest in the psycho-pathological field, Foucault shifts his attention to the political role of medicine in the modern age, theorizing ‘biopolitics’, that is, a situation of indefinite medicalization that tends to have nothing external anymore. How to escape this tragic impasse? It is certainly not Ivan Illich’s anti-medicine that can offer a solution. Reflecting on a theme, emphasized by Canguilhem, in his latest writings Foucault defines a modality of ‘self-care’ that has one of its most important aspects in the relationship between the practice of philosophy and the exercise on oneself, and which allows us to define an ethical strategy of resistance to the heteronomous governance of health.