Warwick workshop on "the normal and the pathological" in September 2011

A workshop on "the normal and the pathological," offered by the Contemporary Issues in Bioethics and Biopolitics research project

University of Warwick, 27-28 September 2011

Confirmed speakers: Jean-Claude Dumoncel, Robert Bernasconi, Bill Fulford, Frederic Worms, Julien Pieron, Florence Caeymaex, Guillaume Leblanc, John Protevi, Charles T.Wolfe and Giuseppe Bianco.

From a philosophical perspective, the problem of illness can be seen to emerge from the tension between the subjective (a life which is mine) and objective dimensions of life. On the one hand, illness is irreducible to an objective fact, as if independent of the subjectivity which it affects; on the other hand, it is irreducible to a mere signification, and cannot be understood independently of its inscription within a living organism, its relation to an environment, and even the effort, on the part of other living beings, to know and treat it. Illness is a qualitative and individual experience that takes place within human life itself. Once we recognise the specificity of illness in those terms, can we not arrive at an understanding of life, and the normal, on the basis of the pathological, and not as what is simply threatened and, ultimately, annihilated by it? Similarly, should medicine not recognize in care (and its latin etymology cura) the ethical implications of the internal tension of life and not isolate the pathology from the subjectivity in which it is rooted?

Far from being of interest only to biology and medicine, the question of the normal and the pathological implicates our perception of life as a whole, in all its forms.

Pathology is at the source of all questioning concerned with life. It's only on the basis of suffering and distress, which are the signs of illness, that every question regarding life, or what living human beings consider normal at a given stage of their history, and the conditions under which such a state can be maintained, becomes possible. "Health is life in the silence of the organs," wrote Leriche. This means that all discourse of life on life spring from that obscure moment when, confronted with an obstacle, life "speaks" or seeks to speak. To the extent that our purpose is to ask about life, we need to begin by asking about life's relation to the pathological, and the epistemological, ethical and political implications of such a relation.

After the classical contributions of Canguilhem and Foucault, we are convinced that it is possible, and indeed necessary, to extend and adapt the reflection of the philosophy of pathology in the light of the new challenges emerging from the evolution of society and the life sciences. In the era of bio-power, the norms have become independent of the normative power of the human being, determining its comportments and excluding those considered pathological. To what extent is it possible to emphasise and promote the normative activity of human life in the face of a system that declares in advance, and down to the most minute details, what is normal? What paradigm of normality and health can we develop as an alternative to auto-immunisation, this disease caused by the excess of concern for health? What critical space is left, or can be generated, in an epoch in which the life sciences make it possible for the human being to intervene on itself, on other living beings, and determine their identity? Is it still possible to develop a normative critique that would not be rooted in the naturalistic paradigm?