Presents in Dementia

This article explores temporal and ethical presents in a dementia ward in Denmark. Dementia wards are often portrayed and experienced as uncanny places where time stands still or becomes radically distorted. I approach the ward, however, as an encounter or access into experiences of time that are hidden from view in the outside world where common-sense conceptions of time (such as clock time, weekdays, months, and years) have a stronger and more persuasive hold on us. With a point of departure in the notions of the ‘ethnographic epoché’ and ‘anarchaeological reduction’, I build on recent developments within critical phenomenology and world philosophies taking my theoretical inspiration from Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka traditions. I explore multiple temporal appearances at the ward: institutional time; intersubjective, potentially frictional time; resonant time; still time; and ritual-event time, appearances that are ever-emerging, blending, and dissolving. In the vocabulary of Madhyamaka philosophy, they appear but are empty, they are empty but appear. Finally, I discuss the ethical implications of a groundless ontology of time for a contemporary Danish ageing landscape characterized by ideals of healthy and active ageing, and propose an ethics of groundless temporal generosity.