ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Michel Foucault's poetics of the visual regime of modernity and morality that have constituted modern man in a moment of history that may be about to efface itself. Modern man will have an empirical affinity for the languages of the body. The emergence of modern medical discourse and its anatomo-clinical method required that death and disease be removed from the metaphysics of evil and decay to be treated as material processes in the living bodies of mortal individuals. The humility — groundedness, mortality, earth — of the post-Cartesian Cogito is the best achievement of Husserlian phenomenology and it constitutes the necessary link between phenomenology and the positive human sciences exemplified in Foucault's own genealogical studies. The healthy body is a clinical body: it is known precisely because it is mortal and its death is the site of medical knowledge that can be employed in the promise of individual treatment.
