The Hidden Body: Gadamer's Concept of Health

This article examines the tension between Hans-Georg Gadamer's phenomenological conception of health as bodily self-concealment (Verborgenheit) and contemporary biopolitical governance through genomic knowledge. Drawing on Gadamer's The Enigma of Health and Foucault's analytics of biopower, it argues that genomic medicine transforms the body into a site of perpetual visibility, fundamentally challenging the phenomenological understanding of health as the silent withdrawal of the body from conscious attention.