Michel Foucault, “Message or noise?”, Translated by Christopher O’Neill, Parrhesia 39 · 2024 · 18-24
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Extract
In order to “situate” medicine amongst other forms of knowledge (savoir), we have become accustomed to the use of linear schemas. Above the level of the body, the soul; below the level of the organism, the tissues. Medicine then has tended at one end towards psychology, psychopathology, etc., and at the other to physiology. However, the discussions that I have been reading bring to light new, diagonal or lateral, relations. Certain problems arise in medicine which seem isomorphic to those that one might encounter elsewhere; especially in those disciplines which are either concerned with language, or which operate like a language. These disciplines have without doubt no “object relation” to medicine, but the latter, understood as theory-and-practice, is perhaps structurally analogous to them.
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