ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Michel Foucault’s poetics of the visual regime of modernity and morality that have constituted modern man in a moment of history that may be about to efface itself. The emergence of modern medical discourse and its anatomo-clinical method required that death and disease be removed from the metaphysics of evil and decay to be treated as material processes in the living bodies of mortal individuals. Truth manifests itself in the discursive space of the corpse, refiguring language and death in the acceptance of man’s finitude and his fundamental bond with life and death released from the metaphysics of evil and suffering. Henceforth, man conceives of himself as a force within a field of forces composed by language, labour and life-processes in which he achieves subject-status only on the basis of object-status in the specific sciences that constitute his self-knowledge.
