Ultimate care: Reflections on the idea of palliative care

The idea of palliative care does not mean care "by substitution'' when caregivers have run out of medical alternatives. On the contrary, it refers to a double priority of care: first, in the medical "cure'' itself, as a technique against suffering, second, in human relationships, founded too as they are on concrete care gestures, of a special kind, creating and holding subjectivities together. Thus, far from leading to ethical or social problems that should be solved from the outside (as the new problem of death or that of the social recognition of care), these problems themselves should be set anew from the perspective of a care practice that is both last and first, and thus twice considered as "ultimate''. (C) 2008 Publie par Elsevier Masson SAS.