Preferred Citation: Cohen, Lawrence. Berkeley: University of California Press, c For my grandparents and especially in memory of my grandfather Joseph Glick. This book is about age, and about its appearance and disappearance in the making of knowledge. It is rooted in a sense that our practices of thinking about society, culture, the body, and the nature of our times would benefit from sustained attention to age as a kind of difference, one particularly relevant to how individuals, groups, and events are imagined and articulated as things in time.
Age as difference has long been a dimension of certain kinds of contemporary critical and interpretive work, notably a philosophical concern with the relation of death to meaning and value and a psychoanalytic concern with the formation of subjects. But these are fairly singular narratives of age, defined through particular junctures, endpoints, or stages, and I have in mind a broader and more sparse conception. I write as a medical anthropologist, and the way I will work toward such a conception of age is through a study that focuses on how people comprehend the body and its behavior in time.
The focus will be on loss, and decay: decay of the body, its reason, and its voice, its ability to be heard as a speaking subject. The focus, in other words, is on senility, and by that I mean a process rooted in the material changes of physiology and political economy and in a diverse set of social practices that determine how generational and other sorts of difference come to matter.
Language here is critical. To call things dementia, a clinical term, presumes a focus on the pathology of the individual. To call things Alzheimer's , a pathophysiologic term, presumes a focus on a particular set of cellular and subcellular processes resulting in a certain neuroanatomical picture.
Calling things senility leaves open the hierarchy of relations between the varieties of material and social process at stake in understanding loss, voice, and the body in time. Most philosophers and scientists are compelled by the nature of the questions they ask to choose between these varied processes, or at least to order and to rank. Is senility best understood in terms of neuropathology and genetics; normative understandings and expectations of old age, dependency, and individualism; or the economics and politics of families, nations, and the world system?
