ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the broad challenges facing health care and bioethics in the wake of the 'genomic turn' in medicine and the analysis is used as a possible entry-point for inserting the biopolitical analysis into the bioethical discourse. The dynamics of knowledge and power entailed by Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian analyses enables a grasp of some of the wider dynamics within which bioethics operates. This was seen both in the radical version, where some of the dangers of modern knowledge-based practices were highlighted, and it were seen in an emerging ethic described by the liberal version. However, there can be no talk of directly applying such insights to bioethics. Significantly, the notions of agency entailed by the Foucauldian framework, renders it unsuitable for application to the practical field of bioethics. This suggests that bioethicists, in addition to biopolitical analyses in the tradition from Foucault, should also look to political theory in the more traditional sense of the word.
