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THE BIOMEDICAL SELF: HERMENEUTIC CONSIDERATIONS
The recent explosion in biomedical knowledge and technologies has given rise to a widespread reconsideration of the nature and meaning of selfhood. Where at one time the self was understood through the frameworks of religion, society, economics, politics or psychology, increasingly theories of the self must reckon with the contemporary belief that in some fundamental way human beings are biological beings, and selfhood is mediated by brain chemistry and genetic heritage. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow (1992) argues that we are witnessing the emergence of 'biosocial' subjectivities - selves, identities and communities defined through pathologies already written in one's genetic heritage. Similarly, Nikolas Rose (2003) asks 'How did we become neurochemical selves?' implying that in a world saturated with Prozac, Zoloft, and Paxil subjectivity cannot help but to be recoded within the logic of biomedicine.
This essay is conceived as an examination of three different ways that social theorists have conceived, and could conceive of, the relationship between biomedicine and the self. In the first section of the paper, I consider the 'naturalist' perspective. In its current guise, naturalism aims to reduce selfhood, and its various expressions, to biology. There already exist numerous critiques of naturalism and its accompanying reductionism. Therefore my examination of naturalism will draw attention to a few examples of how this reductionism has been applied to describe the self. More importantly, I emphasize the accompanying disavowal of social and dialogical theories of personhood. Naturalism does not merely offer biological theories of selfhood. It is also part of an historical process that covers over and hides the necessarily social character of selfhood.
In the second section of the paper, I examine poststructuralism. This perspective has been influential in challenging neo-positivist philosophies of science and hence offers a starting point for critique. It takes seriously the claim that human selves are always embedded in relational scenarios and social circuitries. In addition, recent poststructuralist scholarship has engaged cutting-edge research in the biological and life sciences in order to construct new metaphors of human subjectivity (Clough, 2003; Wilson, 2004). As such, the poststructuralist perspective can be employed to demonstrate one way in which biological theory, and its technologies, can be conceived within the framework of critical social theory.
This said, in its...