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Rethinking the “Ill Body” in the Post-Pandemic Era Havi Carel’s Philosophy of Medicine and the Narratives of the Body

  • Journal of Popular Narrative
  • 2026, 32(1), pp.533~564
  • DOI : 10.18856/jpn.2026.32.1.015
  • Publisher : The Association of Popular Narrative
  • Research Area : Interdisciplinary Studies > Interdisciplinary Research
  • Received : January 10, 2026
  • Accepted : February 22, 2026
  • Published : February 28, 2026

박현선 1

1George Mason University

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper centers on the philosophy of medicine developed by Havi Carel in Phenomenology of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2016) and seeks to rethink the body and disease in the post-pandemic era by exploring “illness” as both an ontological experience and a catalyst for narrative justice. In the processes of infection control and quarantine, COVID-19 intensified a disease-centered gaze and biopolitical regulation by isolating and datafying patients and the infected. As a result, disease became reduced to a manageable object, while the dimension of illness, including anxiety, isolation, and the rupture of relationships as experienced by individuals, remained insufficiently articulated. Taking this gap as its point of departure, this study turns to the phenomenological question of how illness reconfigures the very conditions of human existence. If, from the perspective of the medical system, disease is described primarily in third-person objective language as biological dysfunction, illness is understood as a transformation in one’s mode of being-in-the-world as experienced from the first-person perspective. Carel’s discussions of “bodily doubt” and “embodied epoché” present illness not as devastation or deficiency but as an epistemological shift that compels a reexamination of the meaning of life. Furthermore, through the concepts of the “medical toolkit” and epistemic justice, Carel critiques the exclusion of patient testimony and the processes of dehumanization in clinical settings, proposing practices that restore patients’ rights to name and narrate their own suffering. Building on Carel’s philosophy of medicine, this article further integrates critiques of biopolitics and discussions in ontological political philosophy to argue that all bodies are fundamentally exposed to others and to the environment, and that they exist under conditions in which survival is impossible without mutual care. Finally, the study highlights how a phenomenology of the ill body, at the intersection of medicine, philosophy, and the humanities, foregrounds the ethical and narrative force of storytelling. Every body bears stories from the outset, and these stories speak vividly through the illness. In conclusion, as illness is not an exceptional tragedy but a critical moment that reconstitutes the conditions of community, the post-pandemic era calls for a renewed narrative justice of the body grounded in vulnerability and interdependence.

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This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.
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