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Abstract:

‘One for all, all for one’. This is the famous motto from the Three Musketeers who stayed in solidarity with each other through thick and thin. In fact, the motto illustrates a centuries-old reflection on the relation between the individual and the collective. It is a political problem: how can the whole and its parts result in an act of solidarity? In this paper we will reflect on this relation by exploring the role of genomics in materializing these acts of solidarity. The advent of genomics has enabled the possibilities of increasing personalization, differentiation and risk stratification, showing one’s uniqueness to one another. What kind of solidarity will persist in a society that is obsessed by the singularisation of desires and goals, including one’s health and well-being? At the same time, genomics has enabled the individual to show its relatedness to one another (‘we all have flawed genes’). Here, genomics appeals to a commonness in a generalized humanity where everybody wants to be somebody, as a person similar to others, to be recognized for the human generality one contains (Rosanvallon, 2012). Drawing on case studies from the field of genetic discrimination and insurance in Europe, we will demonstrate how this game of comparison through genomic singularity and similarity plays off in some distinct and often surprising ways, marking out important resources for contemporary acts of solidarity. We thereby articulate the role of national and transnational state, insurance and patient advocacy actors in using genomics as an operator of solidarity - with the desire of safeguarding and/or engineering specific versions of a European polity. Genomics thus provides a unique site for understanding the overarching tension between ‘singularization’ and ‘generalization’ and its related politics of solidarity in contemporary European biosocieties.