Biopower and Debate on Euthanasia

Euthanasia is treated in the article as an ethical and legal-political concept. The symbiosis of medicine and politics reaches its highest pitch in this notion. The following processes led towards intermingling of these two domains in the notion and currently shape discourse on euthanasia: medicalization, bureaucratization of dying that influences the transparency of medical personnel's decisions as well as patients and their families, biopower rationalization, conflicts between experts, worldviews pluralization and the resulting differentiation in how life, death and suffering are understood. Anomalies (unclear status of new entities called neomortos), the change of death criterion into brain death, the wide margin of uncertainty in judicial decisions all concomitant to technological progression compromise the norms endorsed by authorities. When the individual stories of people struggling to be able to undergo euthanasia are inspected (including the ones presented by the media), the discourse unfolding in these stories is not the discourse of homo sacer but of moral subjects. These are the narratives of identity based on dignity and independence. This discourse is rooted in self-reflexivity as defined by Giddens and in the conscious construction of identity projects.