Thread by @deontologistics

I know I'm being pretty harsh on Agamben, but I actually agree with him that we need a critique of healthcare provision (both physical and mental), because the systems established to gate access to diagnosis/treatment often diminish autonomy as much as they enable it.

But we need to be able to look at the concrete details of these institutions without giving ourselves a free pass to ignore the discourses of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry whenever we want. Bad critique is epistemically capricious where good critique is responsible.

This is as good at time as any to repost some unrolled threads from 2019 in which I talk about expanding Mark Fisher's work on the politics of mental health to healthcare more generally (threadreaderapp.com/thread/1181998…) and discuss bipolar disorder specifically (threadreaderapp.com/thread/1173211…).

Part of the critique I've been developing of the 'embodiment paradigm' (thephilosopher1923.org/interview-wolf…) is that its worst impulses are complicit in the sort of counter-productive 'critical' interventions that Agamben's biopolitical critique of epidemiology exemplifies.

Those of us who struggle with our bodies (for various reasons) are all too aware that institutionalised healthcare diminishes our autonomy, not because it exercises power over biology, but because this power is something that we cannot use to cultivate our personal autonomy.

It is more often not so much a matter of the provision of oppression than the privation of freedom, as is all too obvious to anyone living in the US or who has paid even the slightest attention to the healthcare hellscape that's been allowed to flourish there. That's biopolitics.