The government of conduct and the risks of risk in health

Abstract

Through a governmental perspective, we seek to reflect on the ways that the concept of risk operates in health field and dialogue with discursive practices such as New Public Health and Surveillance Medicine. We understand that risk does not exist itself but represents a moral and political technology that produces ways of looking and calculating reality, governing conduct, normalizing the social and making up subjectivities. By stimulating a healthy life, its effects can contribute to a “neoliberal governmentality”, inducing us to active self-vigilance, building an “economic citizenship” and an ideal of “self-entrepreneurs” and creating networks of surveillance and normalization that reinforce submissive and powerless ways of living. Despite these “risks of risk”, these technologies are continually confronted with resistance practices and counter-discoveries that invent others that are possible for health and life.