La confiance dans le dispositif : une obstination déraisonnable
by J. Sainton, M. Derzelle
Psycho-Oncologie, Vol.16, No.2, 2022;
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The recent French legislative evolution concerning the end of life, which tends to substitute the procedure for the relationship, raises questions. Today, every question seems to have to be obstinately transformed into a problem to be solved, and therefore to be solved technically. We are evolving in a context marked by the primacy of technique and law over meaning and human relationships. This paradigm, when confronted with our limitations, accentuates the double anguish of the end of life: fear of suffering and fear of dying. It also favors a nominalist understanding of freedom: autonomy is no longer understood as an achievement but as a refusal, an emancipation from reality. The French law of February 2, 2016, reflects this shift, inviting us to place our trust not in the person but “in the device”. Thus, the advance directives, whose purpose is to give the right to autonomy, are reduced to mastery, the control of the conditions of dying. The device, which makes autonomy depend on a requirement of conformity to technique, becomes the symptom of a profound de-subjectification. The medicalization of death fetters the question of death. And this desymbolization of death goes hand in hand with its individualization, the subject being left more and more alone. It would be advisable to give back to speech and the meaning of their sovereignty. The issues at stake at the end of life are issues of meaning —not of means.
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