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Thinking beyond polemics: Approaching the health society through Foucault

Jenseits von Polemik denken: Die Gesundheitsgesellschaft mit Foucault verstehen

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Abstract

This paper offers a synthetic outline of the contribution of a foucauldian approach to the analysis of health, with specific attention to the dynamics of the relation between health promotion and the ‘health society’. Through the concept of ‘biopower’, this approach was among the first in sociology to highlight the general relevance of health to the constitutive dynamics of modern (and eventually late-modern) societies. Through the concept of ‘governmentality’, scholars in a range of disciplines offered early critical analyses of health promotion discourse in the specific context of neo-liberalism, highlighting some of its paradoxical features. To the extent that such paradoxes are now more widely articulated as an explicit subject for public debate through the notion of a ‘health society’, it might be argued that the critical function initially offered through the notion of governmentality has become somewhat redundant. Against this background, the paper concludes by discussing, through examples relating to new biotechnologies and to drug policy, how a foucauldian approach continues to be relevant in the contemporary context.

Zusammenfassung

Dieser Artikel bietet eine Einführung zu einer von Foucault’schen Konzepten inspirierten Analyse des Gesundheitskonzeptes. Der Artikel fokussiert im besonderen auf die Beziehung zwischen Gesundheitsförderung und der Gesundheitsgesellschaft.

Die Foucault’sche Analyse war der erste soziologische Ansatz der, durch die Einführung des Begriffes der „Biopolitik“, die allgemein konstitutive Bedeutung des Gesundheitskonzeptes für moderne (und möglicherweise auch spätmoderne) gesellschaftliche Prozesse in den Vordergrund gestellt hat.

Das Konzept der Gouvernementalität ist bereits von TheoretikerInnen unterschiedlicher Disziplinen verwendet worden, um den Diskurs der Gesundheitsförderung im Kontext des Neoliberalismus zu kritisieren, wobei auch die Paradoxien des Gesundheitsdiskurses herausgearbeitet wurden. Da derartige Paradoxa im Zusammenhang mit der kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit der Gesundheitsgesellschaft inzwischen weithin zum Gegenstand öffentlicher Auseinandersetzungen geworden sind, könnte man annehmen, dass der Begriff der Gouvernementalität in seiner kritischen Funktion hinfällig geworden sei. Unter Bezugnahme auf Beispiele zu neuen Biotechnologien und die Drogenpolitik argumentiert dieser Beitrag abschließend für die weiterbestehende Relevanz eines foucaultschen Ansatzes für gegenwärtige Debatten.

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    Monica Greco

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Correspondence to Monica Greco.

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Monica Greco is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She is the author of Illness as a Work of Thought: A Foucauldian Perspective on Psychosomatics (Routledge 1998) and several articles in the tradition of research on governmentality. She is the editor of The Body: A Reader (with Mariam Fraser, Routledge 2005) and of The Emotions: A Social Science Reader (with Paul Stenner, Routledge 2008).

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Greco, M. Thinking beyond polemics: Approaching the health society through Foucault. ÖZS 34, 13–27 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11614-009-0010-y

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