“The painterly hand”: embodied consciousness and Alzheimer's disease

Abstract

The prevailing paradigm of Alzheimer's disease is founded upon an assumption that memory impairment caused by cognitive deficiencies leads to a steady loss of the self with the concomitant erosion of individual agency. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to critical gerontology a notion of embodiment and to explore how this constitutes a challenge to the presumed loss of agency in Alzheimer's disease. The critical perspective on the body that I advocate informs my analysis of excerpts from both fictional and nonfictional accounts of the experience of Alzheimer's disease as well as of the controversy surrounding the late paintings of abstract expressionist Willem de Kooning, paintings that were produced in the face of his progressing Alzheimer's disease.