From the clinical body to the ethical body. Medical care in Michel Foucault

This article undertakes an inquiry into medicine as a privileged locus within Michel Foucault’s thought, treating it as a domain in which some of the decisive transformations of modernity are both concentrated and made epistemically legible. Within this itinerary, Georges Canguilhem’s theoretical legacy concerning the nexus of life, normativity, and pathology is deployed as a conceptual hinge enabling a reconstruction of the historical conditions under which modern medicine emerged. From the constitution of the clinic as a regime of intelligibility of the body, the foucauldian analysis traces the shift of medical rationality toward increasingly extensive forms of intervention upon collective life, ultimately examining medical care as a practice in which historically situated modes of subject constitution are at stake. Medicine is thus not regarded, within the reflective framework of the philosopher from Poitiers, as a merely sectorial object of analysis, but as a theoretical and practical dispositif capable of bringing to light the nexus between the production of truth, modes of government, and forms of experience. It is within this Foucauldian movement that medicine reveals an ethical stake internal to practices of care themselves, tied to the configuration of the therapeutic relationship, the position of the patient, and the role of the clinician.