On becoming the subject of health screening: a case study in ‘Conditioned Freedom’

Abstract

The paper mobilises a personal experience of participation in a population-based health screen to explore wider aspects of subjectivity, choice and freedom. The screen is a familiar feature of contemporary society and represents a broader ‘health imperative’. It intrinsically enforces a binary choice and thus, within its own remit, produces two reductive modes of being its subject characterised, respectively, by assent and refusal. Merleau-Ponty’s account of a ‘conditioned freedom’ operating within a primordial, embodied subjectivity, however, allows a recuperation of aspects of my enactment of choice that tend otherwise to be eclipsed within the screen’s binary logic. The thinking of two more recent writers deepens my understanding of how this freedom might play out within experience. David Abram helps me grasp the extent to which I encounter the screen as an ageing animal. Meanwhile a contrast with a very different historical and inter-cultural confrontation explored by Eduardo De Castro raises far-reaching questions around the bindingness of decision and the self/other relation.