"LIFE ETHICS" AS A TERM OF THE "METADISCOURSE" OF PHILOSOPHY (M. FOUCAULT – G. AGAMBEN)

Keywords: bioethics, power, political, la nuda vita, use of self, form-life, ontological rooting of life, philosophizing

Abstract

The title theme of this text is philosophy. Accordingly, the following serves as his leitmotif and working perspective – to talk not about bioethics, but about philosophy. You can try to see this text as a fragment of some "meta-theory of philosophy". In the spirit in which M. Mamardashvili and А. Pyatigorsky talk about the "meta-theory of consciousness": to take certain creations within working philosophy ("philosophies") and see them as some immanent "surrounding" statement of philosophy. Not about the problems that appear in it, but about the status and sanction of the (after) action in which it occurs. More concretely and precisely, the plan is to (re)deduce from "bioethics" as a point of thinking some (in addition to others) potentiated perspective of understanding certain unique, non-overlapping and defining in relation to current thinking (but, at the same time - to current thinking) concepts implemented in modern philosophy. Moreover, the concepts and authors thematized here seem to encourage similar motivation and similar discourse.

In fact, these thinkers are not aimed at formulating a (bio)ethical – normative and imperative – discourse in the classical sense. For each of them, "bioethics" does not possess autonomy, does not produce autonomous products, does not have its own foundations. Instead, "bioethics" for them is a certain derivative and effect of the action of a singular conceptual philosophical vision and its cardinal assumptions. Finally, these thinkers conceptually closely perceive the sphere of the political. At the same time, politics - in different ways, but in each of the two - functions not as an objectively articulated sphere of "political things", but as a sphere of ontological symptomatology and ontological simulation of the entry - inside the world - of the order of grounds.

Accordingly, an important caveat is that we are not trying to give a retelling or interpretation of the concepts of the two selected authors (which, like all concepts of this level, have an open horizon of what can be seen (thought) against the background of the existing (presented) seen).  This is obviously impossible in such a review. This is also impossible given the insufficient potential and internal resources of the author himself. But this is not very appropriate. We are trying to "feel" the framework in which the "metalanguage" of philosophy (in the sense of the word) is pronounced more or less disjointedly...

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Author Biography

Ihor Minakov, Lviv Polytechnic National University

Minakov Ihor V.

PhD in philosophy,

associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy

Lviv Polytechnic National University

Stepan Bandera St., 12, Lviv, 79013, Ukraine

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Published
2026-05-25
Cited
How to Cite
Minakov, I. (2026). "LIFE ETHICS" AS A TERM OF THE "METADISCOURSE" OF PHILOSOPHY (M. FOUCAULT – G. AGAMBEN). The Journal of V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Series Philosophy. Philosophical Peripeteias, (74), 125-136. https://doi.org/10.26565/2226-0994-2026-74-13
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Articles