THE CONCEPT OF THE “ABNORMAL” IN PHILOSOPHY OF PAUL-MICHEL FOUCAUT

Abstract

Annotation. The purpose of the article is an attempt to comprehend the heuristic potential of the concept of “abnormal” in understanding the emerging interdisciplinary ties of modern human science. The methodological basis of the study is the principles and categories of dialectics, philosophical anthropology, medical anthropology, Christian anthropology, a holistic and socio-cultural approach to understanding a person and the formation of new, synthetic forms of knowledge about him. Scientific novelty. The request for new methodological means of organizing and reorganizing knowledge about a person in the second half of the 20th century was deliberately formulated both in foreign and in Soviet and post- Soviet philosophy. Postmodernism, which seemingly rebelled against all methodologies, nevertheless, in the person of P.-M. Foucault, sets its own methodological paradigm for considering a person in the space of the relationship between normal and abnormal. The concept of “abnormal” is the fruit of a particular synthesis of empirical and theoretical approach to understanding abnormality as a specific medicalized phenomenon addressed to society, to the socio-cultural space of human existence. The medicalization of public life is both necessary (during epidemics – leprosy, plague, coronavirus), and at the same time becomes undesirable when the methods and forms of fighting the plague, contributing to the fusion of power and knowledge, become fixed in the society forever. Conclusions. The value of P.-M. Foucault’s research is that revealing the content and meaning of the concept of the abnormal, he proceeded from the analysis of the connections between medicine as knowledge and the sphere of practical activity on the one hand and power on the other. These connections are deep, often veiled, but always manifested in the space of interaction “knowledge – power”. Historical discourse allowed P.-M. Foucault to show the source of the claim – power over the body, its forms change in accordance with the expansion of the socio-cultural space of the functioning institutions wishing to receive this power. Using the example of medical expertise, rather the analysis of its emergence, the thinker reveals the mechanism for creating interdisciplinary connections, which, paradoxically, contributed to further deepening differentiation of medical knowledge. But at the same time P.-M. Foucault always singled out the mediating links that hold interdisciplinary connections.