Anarchizing the clinic in defense of other lives for education

Abstract

The objective of the paper is to develop the analytical hypothesis that the experience of illness in the clinic, once permeated by historical and critical conditions, unfolded in parallel with a conception of life and that, therefore, foreshadowed implications for Foucault’s conception of biopolitics. In order to affirm a conception of life, others had to be abandoned. At stake is “the set of gestures by which the disease, in a society, is involved, medically invested, isolated, distributed in privileged and closed regions, or distributed by means of cure, organized to be favorable”. We will conceive in the idea of “anarchizing” the clinic as a possibility of breaking with its foundations, in the direction of the anarcheology proposed by Foucault in the first classes of 1980, the possibility of resistance to this process. Hence, an attitude of distrust of any power is necessary, in its very origin of normalization; distrusting the powers over life that were built and are built around the clinic, questioning its foundation (arkhé) means questioning the alliances between the clinic and biopolitics, thinking about education.