insurance

risk

nationality

French

occupation / innovator as

historian

scientific organization

French Academy of Technologies

philosopher

is that in which we see how gaming becomes a symbol of the world.

insurance's general model is the game of chance: a risk, an accident comes up like a roulette number, a card pulled out or the pack. With insurance, gaming becomes a symbol of the world' (Ewald in F Effect 199).

is a mode of inquiry that does not see victims and accidents as anomolies, but rather, works at a level of abstraction such that the anomaly is subsumed as part of its process.

Under the regime of juridical responsibility, the accident isolates its victim and its author. It distinguishes them, singularizes them, isolates them, because within this system the accident can only ever be an exception, something which disturbs an order conceived in itself as harmonious. The accident is due to some individual fault, imprudence or negligence... it cannot be a rule. Moral thought uses accident as a principle of distinction... an accident is a unique atrair becween individual protagonist. Insurance, on the other hand, functions through a quite different mode of individualization. A risk is first of all a characteristic of the population it concerns., No one can claim to evade it, to differ from the others like someone who escapes an accideent. When legislation makes a form of insurance compulsory, it acknowledges the mythical character of conduct, however immaculate nad irreproachable it may actuallly be, it harbours wihin itself a risk to others whirh mav be minuscule but nevertheless exist. No will traditionally cited as a yardstick of rectitude in judicial evaluations of conduct can have characteristic weaknesses which put others in danger. the idea of risk assumes that all the individuals who compose a population are on: each person is a factor of risk, each person is exposed to The risk defines the whole, but each individual is a individual is distinguished by the probability of risk which falls to his or her share. Insurance individualizes, it defines each person as a risk, but the individuality it confers no longer correlates with an abstract, invariant norm such as that of the responsible iuridical subiect: it is an individuality ' (Ewald F Effect 203).

is the product of insurance technologies which bring probabilistic methods to bear on data, making risk into an object that can be known and distributed'.

For Ewald, risk is the product of insurance technologies that bring probabilistic methods to bear on aggregated data, producing actuarial representations of risk as an object that can be known and distributed'

Francois Ewald

Authors(0)

Francois EwaldThinkers

Francois Ewald