School of Health Sciences (HESAV), University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland (HES-SO), Avenue de Beaumont 21, 1011, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Center for Primary Care and Public Health (Unisanté), University of Lausanne, Rue du Bugnon 44, 1011, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2021 Jan 11;43(1):5. doi: 10.1007/s40656-020-00359-2.
In this short paper we analyse some paradoxical aspects of France's Foucauldian heritage: (1) while several French scholars claim the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of what Foucault called biopolitics, popular reaction instead suggests a biopolitical failure on the part of the government; (2) One of these failures concerns the government's inability to produce reliable biostatistical data, especially regarding health inequalities in relation to COVID-19. We interrogate whether Foucaldianism contributed, in the past as well today, towards a certain myopia in France regarding biostatistics and its relation to social inequalities in health. One might ask whether this very data could provide an appropriate response to the Foucauldian question: What kind of governance of life is the pandemic revealing to us?
在这篇简短的论文中，我们分析了法国福柯遗产中一些自相矛盾的方面：（1）尽管一些法国学者声称 COVID-19 大流行是福柯所谓的生物政治学的完美例子，但公众的反应反而表明政府在生物政治方面的失败；（2）这些失败之一涉及政府无法提供可靠的生物统计学数据，特别是关于与 COVID-19 相关的健康不平等问题。我们质疑福柯主义是否在过去和今天都导致了法国在生物统计学及其与健康不平等的关系方面的某种短视。人们可能会问，这些数据是否可以为福柯的问题提供适当的答案：这场大流行向我们揭示了什么样的生命治理？
