Care as untranslatable

Care has become an overdetermined word in the medical humanities and beyond, a focus not only of debate around the nature and purpose of the field, but also of the wider issue of the status of medicine in relation to society and the individual. As a symptom of this problematic, this article proposes care as an ‘untranslatable’, in the sense defined by Barbara Cassin. This is pursued via an engagement with the history of the ethics of care and with its translation into francophone contexts as une éthique du care, in tension with the ‘philosophie du soin’ elaborated in the work of Fréderic Worms, and then with the several translations into French and English of Sorge and its derivations Besorgen and Fürsorge in Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. A genealogy of care is thus established, and what emerges as the principal motif of its untranslatability is the relation between a primary form of relation and the socio-technical dimension in which we may recognise healthcare.