ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses a special problem in the current debate on self-governance: the tension between the construction of the autonomous, self-governed individual and the patient in medical-ethical and public discourse, and what seems to be a dissolution of the human body in contemporary biomedical practice. While the dissolution of the human body as we know it can be viewed as a general phenomenon in contemporary, genomics-based medicine. Thus, modern genetic databases are sites where molecularization and informationization crystallize in the form of biological infrastructures that create new trajectories of organizing dispersed human bodies. This chapter explores the tension between the construction of the autonomous, self-governed patient in medical-ethical discourse, and the dissolution of the human body in contemporary medical practice. Communitarian imageries increasingly seem to supplement neo-liberal concepts of self-governance in an effort to react to modern biomedicine's reconstruction of the human body, and its gradual dissolution.
