ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a Kierkegaardian perspective on the ethical and (bio-)political challenges of predictive medicine. Rapidly developing predictive diagnostics can save lives. However, predictive medicine also has the potential to induce severe uncertainty; both health and disease are often reinterpreted in terms of risk. This reinterpretation implies an existential challenge that this chapter seeks to elucidate by means of Kierkegaard’s dialectical understanding of despair as an imbalance among the various concerns that must be reconciled in becoming a self. Two particular forms of despair are most relevant to this task: the despair of finitude as it is paradigmatically embodied in the ‘petit bio-bourgeois’ and the despair of possibility as grounding a biopolitically relevant form of hypochondria. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s spare hints concerning a possible balance of the self, the chapter adumbrates the phenomenology of a more resilient attitude toward the ethical and (bio-)political challenges of predictive medicine.
