ABSTRACT
In his seminal book Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault (1975) explores the genealogies of the modern penal system. Focusing mainly on the eighteenth century, Foucault surprises readers with his intention to write the history of the present. Foucault surely was not interested in a Whig historiography in the sense that he understood the past as an inevitable pre-history of and progression to the present. He rather aimed to highlight the temporal complexities of historiography, which is always situated in and imbued with the present. Foucault understood the past as a space filled with historical fragments, which sometimes might help us to explain the present but even more to grasp its arbitrariness. Relying on Foucault’s idea of the history of the present, I would like to explore what it means to historicize the ‘time of BRCA’. In my contribution I look at the intersecting parts, at the topics, themes and figures which relate and connect the chapters and book sections in order to understand more about the broader picture of BRCA: how does BRCA fit into the history of biomedicine?
