Death, medicine and the right to die: An engagement with Heidegger, Bauman and Baudrillard
Body and Society 3 (4):51-77 (1997)
Abstract
The reemergence of the question of suicide in the medical context of physician-assisted suicide seems to me one of the most interesting and fertile facets of late modernity. Aside from the disruption which this issue may cause in the traditional juridical relationship between individuals and the state, it may also help to transform the dominant conception of subjectivity that has been erected upon modernity's medicalized order of death. To enhance this disruptive potential, I am going to examine the perspectives on death offered by two contemporary writers: Zygmunt Bauman and Jean Baudrillard. Each of these writers recognizes the centrality of death to modern culture, as Heidegger did, but they also go beyond him in specifying the ways in which death maintains a presence in late modernity, despite efforts to conceal it. In particular, both of these writers recognize the important role that medicine has played in ordering the modern conception of death. After situating these two perspectives in relation to each other, and in relation to Heidegger, who will serve here as a sort of benchmark, I will return to the issue of suicide. Given the differences in their readings of the role that death and medicine play in modern culture, these post-Heideggerians take strikingly different positions on this issue. By engaging these perspectives, I intend not only to point out the tremendous potential which this issue holds for a fundamental rethinking of modern subjectivity, but also reveal some of the dangers that may beset any naive optimism about the right to die.Author's Profile
DOI
10.1177/1357034x97003004003
My notes
Similar books and articles
Becoming dislocated: On Bauman’s subjective culture.Chris Till - 2013 - Thesis Eleven 118 (1):116-124.
Death: 'nothing' gives insight.Eric J. Ettema - 2013 - Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 16 (3):575-585.
Punctual Selves, Punctual Death, and the Health-Conscious Cogito: Descartes' Dead Bodies.Thomas F. Tierney - 2012 - Economy and Society 41 (2):258-81.
Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates: Using Philosophy (and Jokes!) to Explain Life, Death, the Afterlife, and Everything in Between.Thomas Cathcart - 2009 - Viking Press.
An Ontological Interpretation to Baudrillard’s Consumption Society Theory.Chen Lixin - 2008 - Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 17:107-112.
Temporal finitude and finitude of possibility: The double meaning of death in being and time.Havi Carel - 2007 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (4):541 – 556.
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil; Jean Baudrillard, Baudrillard Live.J. O'Reilly - forthcoming - Radical Philosophy.
The significance of death for the living.L. B. Cebik - 1980 - Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 1 (1):67-83.
Analytics
Added to PP
2014-03-28
Downloads
137 (#93,341)
6 months
46 (#29,590)
2014-03-28
Downloads
137 (#93,341)
6 months
46 (#29,590)
Historical graph of downloads
Author's Profile
Citations of this work
Suicidal thoughts: Hobbes, Foucault and the right to die.Thomas F. Tierney - 2006 - Philosophy and Social Criticism 32 (5):601-638.
References found in this work
Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present.Philippe Ariès - 1974 - Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.