Introduction

Conceptions of care pervade not only the field of health and illness around the problem of dealing properly with patients, the problem called healthcare, but enter into all areas of collective life. If the primordial relation of care is often idealized in the bond between mother and child as its sine qua non, the ruler in guises as shepherd, guardian, or representative in political care is an important figure in the line of descent from Plato’s Republic on. And there are great variations in modes of institutionalizing the coexistence of authority and responsibility in relationships such as teaching, professions, therapy, and many kinds of dissemination. In part, I want to begin to investigate the usage of care as a point of departure for inquiry under many similar conditions, an engagement that I hope shall begin to make transparent structures of care and its dialectic as a situation that any wide-awake subject must orient to as an environment of knowledge.