Patiences et impatiences d'un patient : autour de la temporalité vécue de la chronicité

In this article, which avoids proposing any new theorization, the experience of a professor of philosophy living with a chronic disease offers matter for discussion on the conceptualization of the temporality of long-term illness, as well as the interrogations and philosophical and existential engagements it implies. This reflection would suggest that the etymology of the idea of therapeutic education, beyond the deontology legitimately preoccupied by social and economic constraints, reveals the raw fundamentals of any educational scheme, i.e., the existence of what can be termed “healthy” and banal. If teaching means “leading beyond”, and in this situation, beyond the insouciance of life into the “silence of the organs”, this education, within the interactivity which necessarily produces the caregiver-patient relationship and the reciprocal “learning” it inspires, remains a self-construction, an intrasubjective dialectic, arising from the spontaneity of decision making, even when it can be suggested, supported or encouraged.