Bruno KUETE

In my sustained research work in Philosophy and in my various scientific publications my interdisciplinary approach consists of approaching medicine from the prism of a plural object from the point of view of its epistemological stakes and its practical aspects. I show, for example, that the body that is examined, auscultated, looked at, touched, punctured and incised is also the body that feels, perceives, loves and suffers, and is not reducible to scholarly knowledge or anatomical-physiological representation. This body is also the unfinished product of a social construction and is, beyond the organs, "matter of symbol, object of representations and imaginations", and therefore presence to oneself, presence to the world and self-image. From the point of view of hermeneutic phenomenology, the body is approached both as body-object of care and body-subject of care, and the sick subject indissociable from this body is considered as historial subject insofar as it tells itself and recounts, through the work of narrative and the clinic, its experience and living of illness and suffering in the context of the end of life.

In fact, the main thrust of my research involves interdisciplinary reflection, albeit with a dominant philosophical background, on the body, illness, health, aging and death in the face of the phenomenon of medicalization and technicization of existence that characterizes our modern, secularized and euphoric societies.

• Kuete (Bruno), "Éthique et soin. Le paradoxe de la catégorie du mourant en fin de vie". Jusqu'à la mort accompagner la vie. Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, n° 153, February 2023, pp. 83-94. https://doi.org/10.3917/jalmalv.153.0083

In my article, I question the representations and imaginaries of the notion of "dying" at the crossroads of medical rationality and euphoric and algophobic societies. This medical rationality is also the logic at work in a medicine devoid of any sense of limits, of non-mastery and de-mastery. In these societies, the category of the dying is anthropologically and socially constructed to evacuate death and existential suffering, which have become social or societal "diseases" or "problems" for medical science and society. I ask: if the term "dying" seems elusive and unthinkable, and proves to be an inconsistency and an antinomy, then how can we work to grasp the meaning, temporality and ethical and ontological stakes of its use at the end of life? I wonder whether we should see the use of this term at the end of life as a stopgap symbolizing the conceptual difficulty of thinking about and determining this temporality of existence and the intrusion of an existential state of death into life.

• Kuete (Bruno), "Métamorphose des frontières de la mort et crise du mourir : le soin sous tension?". Cahiers de l'URPHISSA, Varia, n° 3, May 2022, Dschang, pp. 79-93. https://hal.science/hal-04244200v1

In this article I work to understand how medical advances in resuscitation have overturned society's "evidences" and representations, and led to a paradigm shift from which the ascertainment and definition of death could be established. They introduced a symbolic and social metamorphosis, in terms of changes in the way people viewed and imagined death, leading to questions about what sociologists and anthropologists have called "social death". My approach in this article is based on the rise of modern medicine, in terms of vaccination, anaesthesia, therapeutic innovations, medical imaging and the discovery of morphine. These advances have revolutionized disease prevention, diagnosis and treatment, healthcare organization and pain management. The aim is to show that longer life expectancy, without necessarily a higher quality of life, the scientific and technical transformation of medicine and the preventive, therapeutic and predictive capacity of biomedicine are all helping to push back the limiting frontiers of death.

• Kuete (Bruno), "Le travail du care à l'épreuve de l'identité de genre: dégenrer et politiser le care d'dans un monde commun". Cahiers de l'URPHISSA, Varia, n° 4, December 2023, Dschang, pp. 29-45. https://hal.science/hal-04624411v1

In this article I approach the question of care from a sociological, anthropological, political, ethical and epistemological perspective. The interdisciplinary and critical approach to the notion of "medical care" also aims to account for the semantic complexities of the French translation of the at once descriptive, critical and emancipatory concept of care. It aims to show that the practices of medicine and the practices of care cannot be satisfied with a medical ethics or a simple casuistry, and that if they require an ethics of care to frame them, this should be understood from the point of view of the ethics and politics of care. The intended perspective being an extension of the care relationship to the care relationship and thus to a care society: which implies that medicine must reconnect with the original meaning of care in order to rethink the hospitality and solicitude that traditionally characterize it.

• Kuete (Bruno), "Panser et (re)penser la relation de soin à l'ère de la culture de l'invulnérabilité à partir des éthiques et politiques du care dans notre monde commun", contribution to the Colloque doctoral de la Faculté de Philosophie de l'Université Catholique de Lyon "La relation: concept clé pour une révolution civilisationnelle". may 27-28, 2024 (After review by the reading committee and the scientific committee my paper has been selected for publication in the Colloquium Proceedings in August 2025 by Vrin Editions). https://www.ucly.fr/l-ucly/agenda/colloque-la-relation-concept-cle-pour-une-revolution-civilisationnelle/

In this work, I show that questioning the place, contributions, challenges and stakes of the relationship in the project of a civilizational revolution
requires that we first question the ethical and political theories chosen in democratic societies in terms of values, offers and quality of care. In a sociological sense, these theories determine the conditions of possibility for the construction of a society of care in the sense understood by Joan Tronto, for whom "the legitimacy of the ethic of care will depend on the satisfactory character of the social and political theory of which it is a part". The challenge here is to show that delegitimizing care and obscuring the relevance of its anchorage in the political sphere help to divert our attention from the eminently political and social questions it poses to everyone, and above all to politics. What kind of care, and therefore of relationship, do we want to reserve for the most vulnerable, and in particular the terminally ill, or do we not want to have with them? If accompaniment at the end of life presupposes the establishment of a relationship and what remains to be done when nothing more can be done, how are we to understand the accompaniment that is supposed to be involved in assisted dying, given that it leads to a relational break and a major anthropological rupture? The answers to these questions will depend on the political, social and ethical theories of the
society in which they arise.