Beyond linguistics: Deixis, dementia, and the theatricality of speech in Alzheimer's memoir

Abstract

The writings by and about people with Alzheimer's dementia (PWAD) expose a crisis of indexicality. Specifically deixis, which connects the subject with the referent, breaks down in the absence of a knowable “deictic center.” Linguistic analysis of deixis has classically defined the problem of the subject as beyond the scope of the discipline, but recent work has begun to take it up. The work of linguists, caretakers, and Alzheimer's patients, read together with theories of writing, theatricality, and subjectivity, provides a cross-disciplinary view of deixis — naming, locating, and pointing — in theory and in the care of PWAD. There is a need for greater attention to this problem, especially as discourse on dementia tends to fall back on universal categories of the human.