Abstract

MAIA, Miguel Angelo Barbosa  and  OSORIO, Cláudia. Health care work at the biopower times. Arq. bras. psicol. [online]. 2004, vol.56, n.1, pp.71-81. ISSN 1809-5267.

Making reference to the theories of Yves Clot's Activity Clinic, Foucault and Agamben, we carry out a theoretical reflection on health care workers when they are crossed by contemporaneous Capitalism's inflection. By a concise historical analysis, we consider that the health care practices have favored to have the control over an abstract biological body and that they have been crossed by a market logic, that takes immediate effects both on the people who needs medical treatment and those whose jobs are to take care of them. Considering the work as creative activity, we bring this article to a close suggesting that the care of others can be the same as caring for oneself, as postulated by Foucault, a kind of resistance against the changing of the health care system in a biopower emblematic territory, where the value of one life is decided by a sovereign, as Agamben have said

Keywords : Health; Work activity; Biopower.

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