180129 SE History and Aging, Loss and Reclamation (2020S)

Criticisms of the old are today a commonplace. In times of austerity and social conflict, the elderly are regularly seen as a drain on public resources, prone to traditional prejudices and an obstacle to much-needed political change. In this, popular opinion seems to converge with larger societal tendencies that regard the old as a constituency whose demographic and electoral majorities mean that they must be tolerated – but are ultimately undeserving of any further consideration.

In contemporary philosophy, the situation is little better, its indifference to aging and the elderly supported by canonical principles and prejudices. From the perspective of the philosophy of history, for instance, the elderly’s fixation on the past appears the very sign of what historical progress should overcome. And to a philosophy often indifferent to the sight of even the most flagrant bodily breakdown, the elderly’s experience of pain and suffering will naturally come to appear anathema. Because the knowledge of the old appears to invalidate that promise of progress history has never kept but upon which philosophy relies, the insights of the old are excluded wherever they do not support such illusions.

The present seminar seeks to address contemporary philosophy’s longstanding silence on and hostility to this subject by exploring the work of 20th and 21st century writers for whom the process of aging is seen as essential to not only demonstrating the failure of prevailing forms of historical and philosophical inquiry, but also to developing forms of knowledge that know from within the falsity of those rigid oppositions — between progress and regression, optimism and pessimism, concepts and the concrete, resentment and reclamation, use and obsolescence, memory and forgetting— so characteristic of their time and our own. At a moment when faith in progress is daily undermined by news of the many degradations suffered by human and natural life, the prejudices characteristic of these now-dubious ideas of philosophy and history must be similarly contested.

By challenging inherited ideas about the above-mentioned oppositions, this seminar seeks to better understand the stakes involved in this perennial prejudice towards aging and the elderly. As a result, an oftentimes unremembered history of aging and loss will be here reconstructed through a number of writers typically excluded from the philosophical canon. What would it mean to today reclaim, we ask, those older social and political demands in the face of the present’s tendency towards historical forgetting? And how might insight into aging affect contemporary forms of social and intellectual production otherwise in thrall to ideas of progress and optimism no longer warranted by reality?

To pursue these questions, the seminar begins by returning to Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment and discussion of the relationship between history and life because it is there that this conflict’s social and philosophical stakes are first set. We will then turn to the Austrian-born writer Jean Améry’s essays, “Torture” and “Resentments,” before moving on to his 1968 book "On Aging: Revolt and Resignation." After Améry, we will explore the Romanian-born writer E.M. Cioran’s critique of both philosophy and progress, as well as his lifelong investigations into the body, insomnia and pain, before turning to Simone de Beauvoir’s late memoirs and her pathbreaking book-length study, 1970's "The Coming of Age." The seminar will next move to the Belarussian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s "Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets" (2013), an oral history of those once called "homo sovieticus," whose world, once lost, immediately came to seem obsolete, historical anachronisms. The seminar will close with a discussion of history and memory, aging and progress, writing and truth that will be informed by both previous readings, as well as the work of the historian Reinhart Kosellec