Between Foucault and Agamben: An Overview of the Problem of Euthanasia in the context of Biopolitics (original) (raw)
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How could they ever die?: Foucault’s and Derrida’s deaths as critique of biopolitics
While both are facing death, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida through a similar stoic gesture interrogate in their last seminars the very meaning of death. Derrida ends his ultimate seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, with an ominous/oracular question: “who can die?” He asks this question after recalling the exception that death represents in front of power according to Martin Heidegger. But hadn’t he answered this question earlier when he suggested, following Maurice Blanchot, that the possibility of death defies logics? I distinguish in this analysis of death a critique of biopolitics, that would have been the next step of the philosopher’s investigations on the relationship between sovereignty and human life’s forms of otherness. Foucault in his last seminar, The Courage of Truth, ponders over The Apology of Socrates, the last speech of Socrates, attempt at defending and justifying himself, before being sentenced to death. This seminar constitutes the second part of the previous seminar, titled The Government of Self and Other, and examines the alternative political project emerging from stoic philosophy and in particular how it resounds with present-day politics. Hence, this interrogation of death aims at reshuffling political subjectivity. Why is death so essential to imagine biopolitics’ becoming? What are the similarities but also the differences between the two alternative paths offered by each philosophers? How do they translate in the context of our contemporary surveillance societies? I will focus in particular on three lethal aspects: suicide and the ability to choose death, disease and the living dead, using the work of Maurice Blanchot and Antonin Artaud, two writers who were especially influential on the work of both philosophers, as references.
The Problem with Death: Towards a Genealogy of Euthanasia
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A hugely contentious issue in society today is whether individuals have the right to choose when and how to die. The ethics, legality and morality of euthanasia have been hotly debated in many countries around the world. However, the phenomenon of euthanasia has not just emerged recently, on the contrary a wide ranging and diverse network of events have all played some part in our present day understanding. This paper presents a genealogical analysis, an overview of a Foucauldian 'history of the present', that addresses the issue of how euthanasia has emerged as a possible solution to terminal illness. It examines the conditions present at particular periods of time and a specific, but disorderly collection of incidents that have allowed our present constructions of euthanasia to come about. This focus recognizes the intrinsic relationship between discourse, knowledge and power as the construction of particular discourses of euthanasia that may prevail in our society today, and are accepted as 'common sense,' provide the potential to act in certain ways, while marginalizing alternative practices. This genealogy challenges both the origins and functions of our present day 'knowledge' regarding euthanasia and the assumptions of self-evidence and inevitability that accompany prevailing discourses.
The Normative Immanence of Life and Death in Foucauldian Analysis of Biopolitics
According to Roberto Esposito, the Foucauldian interpretation is divided and dual, and it does not solve what he calls “the biopolitics enigma”, that is to say: how can biopolitics, which aims at protecting and promoting life, lead also to death? In this article I demonstrate that biopolitics is not paradoxical as it may seem, since it is characterized by relations of reciprocal immanence between biopolitics and life, on account of the way it rules the relations between norm and normality. Thus, life is the ultimate object and aim of biopolitics: transformed into a value, life turns itself into norm, making it possible to take actions and strategies of broad range even in a paradoxical way. Taking this scenario of reciprocal immanence, death may be understood as a phenomenon innate to life; in the same manner, its direct or indirect occurrence may be taken as a consequence inherent to life’s biopolitical exercise.
Keywords: euthanasia, dying, death, existential analitics; fundamental ontology, ontology of death, metaphysics of death Abstract: The paper attempts to conceptualize the “ancient” issues of human death and human mortality in connection to the timely and vital subject of euthanasia. This subject forces the meditation to actually consider those ideological, ethical, deontological, legal, and metaphysical frameworks which guide from the very beginning any kind of approach to this question. This conception – in dialogue with Heideggerian fundamental ontology and existential analytics – reveals that, on the one hand, the concepts and ethics of death are originally determined by the ontology of death, and, on the other hand, that, on this account, the question of euthanasia can only be authentically discussed in the horizon of this ontology. It is only this that may reveal to whom dying – our dying – pertains, while it also reveals our relationship to euthanasia as a determined human potentiality or final possibility. Thus euthanasia is outlined in the analysis as the possibility of becoming a mortal on the one hand, while on the other hand it appears in relation to the particularities of its existential structure, which essentially differ from the existential and ontological structure of any other possibility of dying. This is why it should not be mixed up with, or mistaken for, any of these.
Euthanasia-The Right to a Dignified Death
In the contemporary society, ethical issues raise more and more controversial debates. This has also emerged regarding the concept of euthanasia, given that it involves the decision of the patient who is facing the last phase of his life. Since this issue raises more and more debates, we consider it appropriate to bring into discussion the ethical aspects involved by the decision of dying a dignified death.
EUTHANASIA AS PART OF THE RIGHT TO LIFE (Atena Editora)
EUTHANASIA AS PART OF THE RIGHT TO LIFE (Atena Editora), 2022
This article aims to investigate the possibility of legalizing the practice of euthanasia, from the perspective that a dignified death is part of the very right to life. Without forgetting, however, to make conceptual and general considerations about euthanasia, analyze Brazilian legislation, the arguments for and against the practice of euthanasia in Brazil, in addition to conducting a study on the practice of euthanasia in Colombia. In addition, it is an exploratory and explanatory research carried out through a bibliographic review, using the hypothetical-deductive scientific method and revealing itself, in the field of results, in qualitative research, as it will lend itself to increasing knowledge., by the researcher and the reader on the topic addressed. Finally, the article is justified in view of the gaps in the law in relation to the practice of active euthanasia and the possibility of inserting, in the Brazilian legal system, a law that regularizes the subject, considering the perspective of personality rights, especially considering that in Brazil, orthothanasia (passive euthanasia) is already accepted, based on Administrative Resolution No. 1805/06 of the Federal Council of Medicine.
Euthanasia: Between Personal Moral and Civic Ethics
In this article we will focus primarily on the ethical debate on euthanasia and will not approach the subject from the legal field. We also do ethical reflection from civic ethics, from a secular ethics and from civic minimums that human rights are. Civic ethic is the framework of a transnational bioethics; it is the best framework to ensure the peaceful coexistence of plural morals in public sphere. In public sphere there are morals for euthanasia and morals against euthanasia. So, if the ethics of public sphere, not of personal privacy, should be fair and respect the right to choose, both options are respectable and therefore a legal level should decriminalize euthanasia. We discuss that euthanasia is a matter of personal moral and that both options, for and against euthanasia, are ethical. From civic ethics we merely talk about respect for the final decision of an autonomous person, because autonomy is the ethical basis that every moral has to respect. “Euthanasia” is Greek word composed by two parts: eu, good, and thanatos, death. Thus, the word simply means peaceful death. In technological societies, due to the success of medicine, it is possible to live a long time with a disease but without quality of life; in these societies it is possible to keep alive the biological life of a person while his biographical life has finished. In these circumstances some people demand to die with dignity, because they do not want to live without quality of life. In such a context, doctors don’t only have to cure, heal suffering but also help to die.
A matter of life or death: the euthanasia debate under a human rights perspective
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This contribution examines euthanasia from a human rights perspective. It focuses in particular on passive euthanasia and the right to refuse medical treatment, two aspects that remain undertheorised. Special attention is paid to the interplay of human dignity and human autonomy in the context of euthanasia. Zusammenfassung Dieser Beitrag untersucht menschenrechtliche Fragen im Zusammenhang mit der Debatte über Sterbehilfe. Im Vordergrund stehen passive Sterbehilfe sowie das Recht, medizinische Versorgung zu verweigern. Der Artikel analysiert ausserdem das Zusammenspiel von Autonomie und Menschenwürde im Kontext der Sterbehilfe. Résumé Cet article analyse plusieurs questions relatives à l'euthanasie sous l'angle des droits de l'homme. Une priorité est accordée à deux aspects moins souvent discutés, à savoir l'euthanasie passive et le droit de refuser un traitement médical. L'article examine par ailleurs la relation entre autonomie et dignité humaine dans le débat autour de l'euthanasie.