Illness as Experience and Discourse: Research on Foucault’s Policies of Illness and their Role in Contemporary Social Philosophy

Abstract

In this paper I will try first to analyze Foucault's definition of the illness experience seen in basic concepts of his discourse. Second, I attempt to follow this discourse in the domain of contemporary social philosophy, particularly in the philosophy of Didier Fassin (1955), a French anthropologist, and Guillaume Le Blanc (1966), a French philosopher. Thus, in the first section of this study I analyze Foucault's approach to illness, and, in the second section, the deployment of his concepts in social philosophy, to draw some preliminary conclusions.