Biopolitics and living individualization: ethics in the times of biotechnology

Abstract

The article explores the consequences of the development of biotechnologies for the field of bioethics through two fundamental concepts: the biopolitics of Michel Foucault and the individualization of Gilbert Simondon. Understanding of the living in relation with the artificial through cybernetic models transformed, around the 20th century, what is understood today by person, body, and life. This change is made evident on a scientific level, in the principles of molecular biology, as well as at a social level, in a conjunction of new practices related with health. Both levels converge in the notion of molecular biopolitics (Paul Rabinow-Nikolas Rose), whose characteristics were anticipated in the years ’50 by the Simondonian conception of the succession of individualizations: physical, living, psycho-collective, and technical. This work argues that: 1) it is not possible to understand innovation of the biotechnologies without recurring to the biopolitical perspective; and 2) the current crisis of the notion of the individual should be faced proposing an ethics, a bioethics inspired in Simon-don, which renounces the appeal to universal categories.

Keywords

• bioethics
• biotechnology
• individual
• social live
• cybernetics