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The sick man must follow his illness to the place where it is treated... He is set aside in one of the technical and secret zones (hospitals, prisons, refuse dumps) which relieve the living of everything that might hinder the chain of production and consumption, and which repair and select what can be sent back up to the surface of progress.
Michel De Certeau
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Interpretation

What this quote means

The quote underscores the societal tendency to isolate those in need of care while maintaining the flow of production and consumption.

In this quote, Michel De Certeau highlights how individuals dealing with illness are often separated from the rest of society and placed in institutions like hospitals, prisons, or refuse dumps. This separation serves to allow the rest of society to maintain its productivity and consumption without the hindrance posed by those who require care, suggesting a critique of how society deals with vulnerability while placing emphasis on progress and efficiency.

Themes

IllnessSocietyIsolationHealthProductionConsumptionCritique

In practice

Example use cases

This quote could be used in a discussion on healthcare reform to highlight the underground realities of patient care.

More from Michel De Certeau

First, if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), than the walked actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform, or abandon spatial elements.
Michel De CerteauRead
The only freedom supposed to be left to the masses is that of grazing on the ration of simulacra the system distributes to each individual.
Michel De CerteauRead
The trace left behind is substituted for the practice. It exhibits the (voracious) property that the geographical system has of being able to transform action into legibility, but in doing so it causes a way of being in the world to be forgotten.
Michel De CerteauRead
More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.
Michel De CerteauRead
A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two thing being in the same location (place). The law of the 'proper' rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own 'proper' and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.
Michel De CerteauRead
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper.
Michel De CerteauRead

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