François Ewald – författare

Compiled by a well known and respected team of editors and contributors from interdisciplinary backgrounds, this book has its origins in the Euroscreen project, a research project funded by the European Commission to examine the legal and ethical issues arising from the use of genetic testing and screening since 1990. Contributors from members of a sub-group look at the likely impact of genetic testing on insurance.It will be published at a point when the significant controversy surrounding this issue will have intensified throughout the European Union. Although taking a European perspective, it addresses US issues where there is a strong interest in comparative legislative strategies, taking a themed approach, this book looks comprehensively at the basis issues with an analytical rather than a descriptive approach.

Compiled by a well known and respected team of editors and contributors from interdisciplinary backgrounds, this book has its origins in the Euroscreen project, a research project funded by the European Commission to examine the legal and ethical issues arising from the use of genetic testing and screening since 1990. Contributors from members of a sub-group look at the likely impact of genetic testing on insurance.It will be published at a point when the significant controversy surrounding this issue will have intensified throughout the European Union. Although taking a European perspective, it addresses US issues where there is a strong interest in comparative legislative strategies, taking a themed approach, this book looks comprehensively at the basis issues with an analytical rather than a descriptive approach.

“The working hypothesis is this:  it is true that sexuality as experience is obviously not independent of codes and systems of prohibitions, but it needs to be recalled straightaway that these codes are astonishingly stable, continuous, and slow to change.  It needs to be recalled also that the way in which they are observed or transgressed also seems to be very stable and very repetitive. On the other hand, the point of historical mobility, what no doubt change most often, what are most fragile, are modalities of experience.”

- Michel Foucault 

In 1981 Foucault delivered a course of lectures which marked a decisive reorientation in his thought and of the project of a History of Sexuality outlined in 1976.  It was in these lectures that arts of living became the focal point around which he developed a new way of thinking about subjectivity.  It was also the moment when Foucault problematized a conception of ethics understood as the patient elaboration of a relationship of self to self.  It was the study of the sexual experience of the Ancients that made these new conceptual developments possible.  Within this framework, Foucault examined medical writings, tracts on marriage, the philosophy of love, or the prognostic value of erotic dreams, for evidence of a structuration of the subject in his relationship to pleasures (aphrodisia) which is prior to the modern construction of a science of sexuality as well as to the Christian fearful obsession with the flesh.  What was actually at stake was establishing that the imposition of a scrupulous and interminable hermeneutics of desire was the invention of Christianity.  But to do this it was necessary to establish the irreducible specificity of ancient techniques of self.