On the Silent Anarchy of Intimacy

Abstract

In this chapter, I propose a critical phenomenology of the still modes of life with dementia. Still life, I argue, is not stale life. Stillness resonates. Breathes and pulsates. In a series of ethnographic “resonance images” sketched during fieldwork at a dementia unit in Denmark, I attempt to capture such potentiated, intermediary spaces of resonance to explore registers of life that are generally and profoundly at work in human experience, but often eclipsed in the commotion of daily life and outshouted in the common sense discourses that delimit our shared worlds. I will conclude by sketching some implications of these analyses for the ethics of dementia care.