Abstract
This essay discusses the use of analogies drawn from the Holocaust in cultural representations and critical scholarship on dementia. The paper starts with a discussion of references to the death camp in cultural narratives about dementia, specifically Annie Ernaux’s account of her mother’s dementia in I Remain in Darkness. It goes on to develop a critique of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitics and “bare life,” focusing specifically on the linguistic foundations of his thinking. This underpins a consideration of the limitations of his philosophy and ontologically derived notions of weakness and passivity in imagining life with dementia as a potential site of agency or as the locus for transformative ideas about care, community, and non-instrumentalist conceptions of human value.
Highlights
The Spectre of the CampThe spectre of the death camp haunts a number of literary, memorial, and scholarly responses to the lateIn the first part of the essay, I discuss the French feminist writer Annie Ernaux’s account of her mother’s dementia and hospitalization in I Remain in Darkness (Ernaux 1999)
Agamben’s view of the indistinct separation between the structure of language and its utterance informs his characterization of the aporetic potentiality of human experience. This indeterminacy gives rise to the potency of Agamben’s biopolitics, but it provides a contextualization of his work that is often missing in dementia scholarship in which his work is cited, and it enables me to identify some the limitations of his thesis in relation to our thinking about dementia today
My aim is to show that these limitations are indicative of broader problems with some dominant cultural epistemologies of the Bdementia crisis^ and its exemplary status in current debates about personhood and care
Summary
The spectre of the death camp haunts a number of literary, memorial, and scholarly responses to the late. This description of life on the ward is of an existence outside meaningful temporal divisions, in which conventional markers of progress and change are suspended; there are Bno more seasons^ and none of the clocks tell the right time This aligns the temporal dimensions of residential care with Giorgio Agamben’s highly influential vision of the camp as a liminal Bzone of indistinction^ (Agamben 1998, 25), a place in which people exist in a state of exception, stripped of their legal and political identities in a time and space between life and death. As Antonio Negri notes, for Agamben, the logic of biopolitics and human infancy means that all aspects of human sociality are Bbipolar and transitive: home and city, zoe and bios, life and politics, [langue and parole], flow from one to the other, and are situated within an ever reversible flow^ (Negri 2007, 117)
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