Getting ready for this workshop, I'm struck by this passage by Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (103-104F, 161E), which lends a certain concreteness to the term "class war."
It is in this sense that Halbwachs deals with death as a social phenomenon, believing that the age at which death occurs results largely from working and hygienic conditions, attention paid to fatigue and diseases, in short, from social as much as physiological conditions. Everything happens as if a society had "the mortality that suits it," the number of the dead and their distribution into different age groups expressing the importance which the society does or does not give to the protraction of life.
In short, the techniques of collective hygiene which tend to prolong human life, or the habits of negligence which result in shortening it, depending on the value attached to life in a given society, are in the end a value judgment expressed in the abstract number which is the average life span. The average life span is not the biologically normal, but in a sense the socially normative, life span. Once more the norm is not deduced from, but rather expressed in the average. This would be clearer still if, instead of considering the average life span in a national society taken as a whole, we broke this society down into classes, occupations, etc.
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