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Between truth and hope: on Parkinsons disease, neurotransplantation and the production of the selfCentre for Health Services Research, University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, T.E.Moreira{at}newcastle.ac.uk
Department of History at Lancaster University, P.Palladino{at}lancaster.ac.uk In this article, we argue that contemporary biomedicine is shaped by two, seemingly incommensurable, organizational logics, the regime of truth and the regime of hope. We articulate their features by drawing on debates sparked by the recent clinical trial of a new approach to the treatment of Parkinsons Disease. We also argue that the self is configured in the very same process whereby these two organizational logics interlock and become mutually dependent, so that the self might be said to be the effect of a parasitic relationship between the regimes of truth and hope. We then bring these two arguments to bear on the contrasting views of the relationship between embodiment and political subjectivity articulated by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, on the one hand, and Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, on the other hand.
Key Words: biopolitics neurosciences self stem cells subjectivity
History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 18, No. 3,
55-82 (2005) |
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