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Biomedical Intervention in Human Body and Some Problems on Biopolitic

  • Journal of Humanities
  • 2014, (54), pp.449-485
  • Publisher : Institute for Humanities
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : June 30, 2014
  • Accepted : August 4, 2014

Eul-Sang Lee 1

1신라대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

In fact, human body is actually a biological-sociological entity, but hastraditionally been treated only as a bearer of “mind” or ‘the self.” From thisconventional viewpoint, human body was no more than a dependent variable. Boosted by modern political movements, however, human body came to beunderstood as an independent entity, from which was born the equation that“human body is life.” Unlike the modern political movement that treatedhuman body as an issue of rights, the life-community regarded human bodyas an object of medical management. Finally, the state came to commandmedical science, opening the way for it to occupy the individual body. Michel Foucault called such an affair of life in the life-community“biopolitics.” But the issue of biopolitics is not restricted only to a“life-management” that rescues a life from the infectious diseases. Humanbeings wish to live a “better life,” and such human desires have given birthto modern “eugenics.” But Nazi Germany used eugenics as a means ofcarrying out “ethnic cleansing” from which emerged G. Agamben’s“death-politics (tanapolitica).”Based on Foucault’s biopolitics and Agamben’s death-politics are born P. Rabinow and N. Rose’s “the politics of life itself,” which is evaluated ashaving opened a new realm of biopolitics in the post-genome era. In the post-genome age that started from the “Human Genome Project” in 1992, a“gene” is life itself. This study has discussed how a gene is treated in thepolitical context and how gene-politics can possibly acquire justification.

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