Social medicine and its political stakes from Foucault

Considered as a "toolbox", Foucault's thought in general, and his approach to social medicine and its issues in particular, has served as a background for analysis in order to short-circuit, disqualify, and break the systems of power. Faced with the breadth of Foucault's work and the multiplicity of its uses and reinterpretations, we are obviously far from having identified all the modes of problematization and all the objects of analysis that are linked to the Foucaultian approach to social medicine. Of course, our intention was not to re-do the history of social medicine, but rather to highlight three key moments in the analysis of the stakes of social medicine in reference to the theme of biopolitics, to underline for each one a specific mode of problematization of life and to interpret the political and social significance that emerges from it, with regard to the different phases of political modernity and the types of society to which they refer. This line of analysis has led us to a relatively critical questioning of the status of references to life and health that is inferred from the notion of medicalization.