Open-access Knowledge and medical practice and the constitution of personal identity

This paper aims to examine the relationship between health practices and the constitution of personal identity. Our starting point is Foucault's theory which states that modern medicine inaugurates a field of scientific knowledge on the body, considering its objectification based on the reference to death. This central part of the body in the medical realm allows the way the subject relates to itself, in which awareness of itself as singularity, that is, as I myself, is mixed-up with organic individuality. We presuppose that within the clinical context, identity formation is bound to the limits of corporeity. However, due to bio-medicine, the body has become an object of manipulation of the individual, and changes the identity relationship between subjectivity and corporeity. Disembodied, personal identity turns into a frenziedly mobile reality.

Health practice; corporeity; Michel Foucault


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