VIDEO OF THE BOOK ANCIENT MEDICINE

From 1984 until today, books and articles have been written in a large way on the work of Michel Foucault.  Many of these works have attempted to integrate the different texts, courses, interviews and articles made by the French philosopher from 1955 to the year of his death.  Other research has concentrated on more specific aspects.

 The methodological discussions around archeology and genealogy have been varied;  while the issues of power and biopolitics have generated a significant number of jobs.  Recently, the subject of neoliberalism studied by Foucault during the Collège de France in 1979 has opened a significant amount of research that has set out to diagnose the political and social present of the contemporary world.

 Before this event, some questions immediately arise: does it make sense to continue investigating and revising the thinking of a philosopher before whom, apparently, everything has already been said?  Why Foucault again?  Despite how much has been written about this thinker, it is important to note that there are several dimensions of his work that have not yet been adequately explored.  The approaches to the subject of medicine made by the Poitiers native are scarce.  Two valuable compilations have specially addressed this topic5.  In them, scholars such as Nikolas Rose, David Armstrong and Bryan Turner made important contributions.  However, these works, despite being valuable, are presented in a fragmentary way, they do not articulate the topic of medicine with broader problematizations pointed out by the philosopher (Foucault, 2001a).  On the other hand, the approaches to the investigations that cover medicine in the Greco-Roman societies of antiquity carried out by the "post-structuralist" thinker, a subject investigated above all in volumes two and three of the History of sexuality, are almost non-existent.

 Michel Foucault and later Nikolas Rose managed to make a diagnosis of the present by showing how psychotherapeutic rationalities established a "regime of the self" in which a relationship with oneself prevailed, crossed by the obligation to tell the truth (Foucault, 2007).  

In this sense, modern psychology has been vital in the constitution of a lexicon of terms through which human beings describe themselves (Rose, 1998).  Furthermore, it is important to note that current medicine is subject to different variations that have a significant effect on subjects.  For Rose, different technological transformations are orienting medical rationality towards molecularization, optimization and economies of vitality.  In addition to this, it should be said that States no longer assume the obligation to "make live" as happened at other times.

  It is in the market order where new risk management and administration technologies are installed, which means that it is individuals who must become the makers and managers of their own health.  Self-care within current political rationales is essential.  From public and private institutions, individuals are permanently instructed to "take care of themselves", optimizing their bodies and minds to achieve an unbeatable integration with the demands of the market (Rose, 2007).