End-of-Life Issues in the Context of Biopolitics and Bioeconomy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 October 2023
Summary
Abstract
End-of-life issues such as the question of the border between life and death, controversies around bioeconomization of the human body and commodification of life, around the ethical dimensions of terminating one’s life and the consequences of legalization of assisted death are more and more objects of public and expert debate. There are broader reasons for this: the advance of medical technology, hybridization of living forms, posthumanist reflection, bioart, the unprecedented scale of ageing of the human population and the consequences of this process expressed in an apocalyptic tone, and the vision of the extinction of homo sapiens thanks to climate change. Doubt in the omnipotent knowledge of experts, pluralisation of social norms, blurring of the borders of crucial categories, social movements that resist biopolitical and bioeconomic powers are shaking the foundations of biopolitics. Despite mobilization of biopolitics and the growing expansion of the bioeconomy I will give examples of “junction points” which are mediation-resistant, driving biopolitics into “implosion” (in Baudrillard’s sense).
Keywords: end-of-life, death, bioeconomy, biopolitics, bare life, aging
Introduction: Death is not taboo any more
End-of-life issues, such as the question of the border between life and death, controversies around commercialization of the human body, and the ethical dimensions of terminating one’s life are more and more objects of public and expert debate. Debates on legalization of assisted death—euthanasia and physician assisted suicide—arise in Europe, America, Australia and in many other places. Death is not taboo any more. The consciousness about death as a personal and global issue is growing. There are more and more voices saying that we are living in the shadow of a volcano—an ecological catastrophe.
Death is a definite end of life in the individual form. Despite medicalization of death, despite debating about end-of-life issues in the context of the medical definitions of death, law, economy, life sciences’ technologies, and abstract, universalized values in bioethical theories, death is also something different. Bioethics and law focuses on the question, what is to be done, which options for decision-making are? All these disciplines reduce life to “bare life” (in Agamben’s sense).
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- Approaches to Death and DyingBioethical and Cultural Perspectives, pp. 103 - 120Publisher: Jagiellonian University PressPrint publication year: 2021