Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Aging Studies

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaging

Alienation and alterity: Age in the existentialist discourse

on others
Harm-Peer Zimmermann
Institute of Social Anthropology and Empirical Cultural Studies, Popular Literature and Media, University of Zürich, Affolternstraße 56, 8050 Zürich, Switzerland

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: Aging Studies and Postcolonial Studies belong together in a rather fundamental way, given that
Received 1 March 2015 they share profound theoretical roots and far-reaching critical perspectives. These derive not only
Received in revised form 1 June 2015 from the more recent poststructuralist discourse on others but also, further back, from the
Accepted 15 June 2016 existentialist discourse on others — particularly in issues relating to “The Look” as elaborated by
Available online 30 June 2016
Jean-Paul Sartre in his major philosophical treatise Being and Nothingness and in his reflections on
racism, colonialism and humanism. These texts have had a decisive influence on both Aging
Keywords: Studies and Postcolonial Studies. First, no less a figure than one of the main progenitors of
Postcolonial theory Postcolonial Studies, Frantz Fanon, drawing on Sartre, analyses the gaze of the colonial masters
Existentialism
and black responses. Second, two of the most significant theoretical works on aging and age to
Ageism
have appeared since 1945 were directly inspired by Sartre: Jean Améry's On Aging and Simone de
Alienation
Alterity Beauvoir's The Coming of Age. Additional sources of interest are the phenomenology of
Old Age responsibility by Emmanuel Lévinas and works on absurdity and rebellion by Albert Camus. It is
Othering this early influence that is explored from two perspectives adopted by more recent postcolonialist
Otherness discourse: debates around the concept of alienation involve analysing and critiquing the kind of
epistemic violence which renders abject and invisible not only old people but also all those who
are ‘othered’ by a dominant gaze (racism, ageism, othering); and the concept of alterity involves
debating ways of acknowledging otherness responsibly on the one hand and being able to
articulate and represent oneself on the other: Can the subaltern speak? We might similarly ask
“Can the old speak?” Postcolonial discourse tells us that this is not quite as easy as some versions
of so-called “Happy Gerontology” proclaim. The aim of the present article is to examine the
foundational existentialist critique of racism and ageism and to render it useful for re-negotiating
possibilities for aging differently — without othering.
© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Within the broad spectrum of academic disciplines, re-
search topics and methodological approaches that characterize
Aging Studies today (Katz, 2014), there are few approaches
that adopt a postcolonial agenda. Those that do so are
recognizable by their participation in a discourse that is key
to Postcolonial Studies: the discourse on others. Doing Aging
Studies with postcolonial intentions means, above all, studying
E-mail address: hpz@ipk.uzh.ch.
the old as ‘other’ (Hazan, 2009: 61). Within this, it is possible to
identify two distinct perspectives:
• The first addresses socio-cultural processes and power
relations in which age and aging are viewed as separate and
distinct from other phases of life. Old age appears as the
problematic, bewildering Other to that which is considered to
be life's norm (Hazan, 1994; Philippson, 1998; Turner, 1995).
Such processes of othering and abjection are debated in
Postcolonial Studies using the terms alienation and othering
(Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2006: 576, 584). Critique is

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2016.06.002
0890-4065/© 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
84 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
directed at an “epistemic violence” that regards other people
essentially as subaltern and consequently excludes them
(Spivak, 1988a: 280–281; Spivak, 1999: 265–266).
• The second perspective addresses ways of acknowledging
and accepting other people in their difference. Given a
situation in which attributes, constructions and representa-
tions are ascribed asymmetrically, is there a place where old
people can speak for themselves and from their own
experience (Cole, Achenbaum, Jakobi, & Kastenbaum, 1993;
Gubrium, 1993; Hazan, 2009: 66; Spivak, 1988a)? Such
possibilities are debated in Postcolonial Studies using the
terms otherness and alterity (Ashcroft, Griffiths, & Tiffin, 2006:
576, 584). The difficult challenge is that of facilitating
counterhegemonic representations of the Other.
Up to now postcolonial discourse on others has not been
systematically examined in terms of its implications for Aging
Studies (Hazan, 2009; van Dyk & Küpper, 2014). Having said
this, there are areas of research in Aging Studies and Critical
Gerontology which coincide with postcolonial intentions. This
is especially the case in studies that focus on cultures and
cultural representations of age and aging, cross-cultural aspects,
migration and hybridization of aging. Specifically, ideas about
age discrimination which compare it to racist attitudes (racism,
ageism) fit into the context of Postcolonial Studies as well
(Biggs, 2004; Butler, 1969; Hatch, 2005; Palmore, 1990;
Coupland & Coupland, 1993; Holstein & Minkler, 2003; Todd,
2002). Although the question ‘Can the old speak?’ has not yet
been asked in the context of postcolonial theory, one of the
main intentions of actor centred micro-studies in Aging Studies
is to ensure that the voices of the elderly are heard clearly
(Baars et al., 2006: 4–5; Cole et al., 1993; Gubrium, 1993). This
also requires “the creation of alternative concepts and visions
about the future of age” (Baars et al., 2006: 1). Incorporating
analytical perspectives from postcolonial theory in Aging
Studies can be regarded as a key opportunity to develop such
concepts and visions.
The present article seeks to theorize age by taking up an
older, foundational critique of racism and ageism, namely, the
existentialist discourse on others. In this context, Fanon highlight-
ed a number of key issues that were to prove pivotal for current
debates in Postcolonial Studies, while Améry and de Beauvoir
anticipated various postcolonial perspectives in current Aging
Studies. Central to this analytical discourse beginning in the
1950s is the critique of hegemonic views of other people,
described later by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988a) in terms
of essentialism and epistemic violence. On the one hand the issue
is one of othering and alienation: in what ways are old people,
groups and indeed entire cultures fixed, objectified and excluded
by privileged gazes, perspectives and representations? On the
other hand, there is also the question of otherness and alterity:
how can other people speak for themselves and be recognized
and accepted as other (different) — without othering?
The main epistemic problem lies in binary codes, that is, in a
hegemonic binarism which reduces relations between cultures
and, similarly, between generations to dualistic oppositions: us
and them — black/white, old/not old. Since Edward Said's
pathbreaking work on orientalism (1978), critique in Postcolo-
nial Studies has been focused on an epistemological imperialism
summed up by Hall (1992a) in the pithy formula ‘the West and
the Rest’. Colonialism appears accompanied by a discursive
power which insists upon and justifies the superiority of western
cultures by designating other people and cultures as subaltern,
by denying essential value to them (racism) and by misusing
them as a negative foil for positive images of its own culture
(othering) (for an overview, see Ashcroft et al., 2006).
This binary logic of vilification was analysed in gerontolog-
ical perspective for the first time by Améry, ([1968] 1994) and
de Beauvoir, ([1970] 1996), who based their work primarily on
Sartre. Prior to this, Fanon ([1952] 2002, [1961] 2001) had
analysed colonialism and racism, referring in the process to
Sartre's critique of binarism (which he called Manichaeism).
Taking Sartre as a point of departure, both Fanon and de
Beauvoir and Améry agree in terms of their proposals for
solving the problem. Sartre had argued in favour of holding the
gaze “in continual suspension” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 12),
indeed of establishing suspension as the antiracist mode of the
gaze per se. In this way, he argued, socio-cultural boundaries
fixed by binary codes can repeatedly be transcended, enabling
one to take “responsibility” for the other. Following this idea,
Fanon as well as Améry and de Beauvoir developed an account
of alterity and otherness which is remarkably similar to that of
hybridity and a third space elaborated in Postcolonial Studies by
Homi Bhabha in particular ([1986] 2002, [1988] 2006, 1994;
2012), not least in reference to Fanon as well as to Lévinas. In
the case of Améry this occurs by drawing heavily on the work of
Camus ([1942] 2013, [1951] 1992).
The present account focuses on the theoretical nexus of
“binarism” and “essentialism”. At the heart of this account is an
important controversy that turns on the question: Can the
subaltern speak? (Can the old speak?). Our exploration of
postcolonial discourse focuses on those conceptual strands
which extend backward from Hall, Spivak and Bhabha to
Fanon and Sartre and which are also crucial to the theory of
age and aging presented by Améry and de Beauvoir respectively.
An additional original connection between Aging Studies,
Postcolonial Studies and Gender Studies is apparent in de
Beauvoir which can be mentioned only briefly here. To begin
(alienation), we shall discuss racism and ageism in three stages:
(1) gaze and race (Sartre); (2) white gaze and othering (Fanon,
Hall, Spivak); (3) alienation and ageism (Améry, de Beauvoir).
Next (alterity), we discuss in five stages various ways of
overcoming racism and ageism while simultaneously justifying
otherness; reference will be made here additionally to Lévinas
and Camus: (4) open gaze: reflection and responsibility (Sartre,
Lévinas, Spivak); (5) black gaze: hybridity and instability (Fanon,
Bhabha); (6) subalternity and old age: respresentation, resigna-
tion, rebellion (de Beauvoir, Améry); (7) old Sisyphus speaks: no!
and yes! (Camus, Améry); (8) La vieillesse n'existe pas (Camus,
Améry, Lévinas, de Beauvoir). Finally I will draw (9) conclusions
with regards to current debates on age and aging, particularly
reflections on pathos formula such as active, productive,
successful aging and on the cult of the young-old.
Gaze and race
The term alienation was introduced into research on old age
by Améry ([1968] 1994: 93). However, its philosophical starting
point is the work of Sartre ([1943] 1992: 252–298): the basic
relationship of one person to another person is determined day
in, day out by the gaze. This is not an exclusively visual
phenomenon and is not solely about the ways individuals look
 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95 85

at others. Rather, it is about the force and the power with which remain a Jew” (ibid.: 54). Although: “The Jew only
people mutually regulate their relationships, committing them- serves him as a pretext; elsewhere his counterpart will
selves to certain forms of relationship, ways of behaving, and make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin” (ibid.:
norms and values. 38). Or indeed of older people.
We are daily forced to exist “in a world in which ‘there are’ (b) Binarism: The racist Look divides the world into two
also Others”, in a world that is always already ordered, and into camps. Sartre speaks of the “great Manichaeistic division
which we are slotted by means of “the Other's look” (Sartre, of the world into black and white” or into Aryans and
[1943] 1992: 352). We live within an “ensemble of limits and Jews (Sartre, [1948] 1964/65: 21). A kind of biopolitics is
restrictions” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 42–43) to which we commit in operation along the deterministic faultline drawn
ourselves mutually with our ways of looking. Thus I am, first and between black and white, Jew and Aryan. A “biological
foremost, always an “object for the Other” (ibid.: 349), who is style” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 86) is imputed to races –
constantly judging, “fixing” (defining) and identifying me and every positive, good and superior characteristic is
who is “constitut[ing] me as a means to ends” (ibid.: 358) — attributed to the one side and every negative, bad and
according to the situation and the context in question. Indeed, I inferior (subaltern) characteristic to the other.
am completely at the mercy of other people's gaze, expectations
A racist always judges his own race with “complacency”,
and challenges: they determine me completely to the extent
namely, in the essentialist glow of its apparent superiority
that I cannot but accept their judgments and decisions and
(ibid.: 86). He devotes himself in body, mind and spirit “to
incorporate them as parts of myself (ibid.: 351–352).
procuring perceptions of himself that correspond to his vital
Thus questions about individual freedoms, subjectivity and
ideal” (ibid.). The white man places himself centre-stage as the
humanity need to be addressed fundamentally in relation to
culmination and telos of evolution, as the embodiment of
the problem of determination by “the Other's look”. The self
universal values, as an übermensch in intellectual, moral and
constitutes itself as an “I” that is at the mercy of and subject to
vital respects: “The white man – white because he was man,
the gaze of others, thus literally sub-iectum. It is this process
white like daylight, white like truth, white like virtue – lighted
that Althusser (1971) rearticulated as symbolic appellation.
up the creation like a torch and unveiled the secret white
Additionally, though, the questions of power and normalisation
essence of beings” (Sartre, [1948] 1964/65: 13).
associated with this and articulated later by Michel Foucault
Playing opposite this starring role are “the Jew” and “the
and others can also be found in Sartre. He speaks of the
Negro” as the exact inverse figures. Jews and Black people
“solidification and alienation” (Sartre, [1943] 1992: 352) of
appear subaltern as if by nature — rejected ethnicities that need
human potential brought about by the “gaze of the others” and
to be kept at a distance and excluded (Sartre, [1944] 1995:
illustrates the everyday drama of this process in his play No Exit
59–60; 86–87). Blacks are particularly affected by this (Sartre,
(Sartre, [1944] 2010: 52): “L'enfer, c'est les autres”, as the
[1948] 1964/65: 18–19). Their skin pigmentation is taken as an
much-quoted highlight of this play states. It is in the gaze of the
opportunity “to reduce [the black man] to the status of a beast”
others that the hell of my potential arises.
(ibid.: 18), culminating in violent orgies both real and
However, just as power is an ambiguous notion in Foucault,
imagined: “aura of rape and massacre” (ibid.: 34). Racists
so too is the gaze in Sartre: it can be closed-off, denying and
destroy other people's life chances by forcing them compre-
restrictive or else open, affirming and productive. The open
hensively into a subaltern mode of existence in which they are
gaze has a facilitating effect on people's lives (see Open gaze:
unable to express or utter anything. Lévinas has spoken of the
reflection and responsibility section below). The closed-off gaze,
“objectifying eye” (Lévinas, 2000: 128), “with its negation of all
by contrast, determinedly and obsessively identifies and
otherness through murder or through encompassing and
objectifies people in certain determinative ways — regardless
totalizing thought” (ibid.: 147).
of the situation or the context. This gaze leads to radical forms
of stigmatisation, rejection and exclusion.
White gaze and othering
Thus Sartre describes not only what looking can do but also
how it works. He undertakes these second-order observations
Fanon ([1952] 2002, [1961] 2001, [1966] 1988) initiates
(Sartre, [1944] 995, [1948] 1964/65) using the example of the
postcolonial discourse (Bhabha, [1986] 2002; Said, 1993; Hall,
most extreme form of the closed-off gaze: anti-Semitism and
1996) by referring back to Sartre's analysis of racism and to the
racism. For Sartre (as later for Foucault, 2008, 2010) the point at
two main aspects of it – essentialism and binarism – in
issue here is a kind of biopolitics and of coerced normalisation.
particular. As we shall see, however, his analysis is not without
Sartre takes up a term coined by Freud ([1895] 1955, [1900]
critique. Fanon takes the linchpin of Sartre's analysis of as his
2010): “overdetermination”. The racist gaze is “overdetermined”
starting point, namely, the politics of power and of the body:
and this in two distinct ways: essentialism (determinism) and
the look, the gaze, the eye, the stare, the glance. “And already I am
binarism (Manichaeism).
being dissected under white eyes, the only real eyes. I am fixed”
(Fanon, [1952] 2002: 116); “the movements, the attitudes, the
(a) Essentialism: Racism is not limited to stereotypical
glances of the other fixed me” (ibid.: 109). “I am given no
perceptions. The main problem is that prejudices are
chance, I am overdetermined from without” (ibid.: 116). The
justified deterministically. What anti-Semites do is
Black man is overdetermined as “object”, the White man is
“to determine the Jew by his race” (Sartre, [1944]
overdetermined as “subject” (ibid.: 155). – Two distinct aspects
1995: 46). This determinism takes a set of prejudices
can be identified here, just as in Sartre's approach:
and uses them to construct essential criteria that are
then applied, unaltered, in every situation and every (a) Essentialism: Like Jews, Blacks are “racialized” (ibid.:
context: “no matter what he does, he is and will 122). White anthropologists and medics state that “My
86 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
chromosomes were supposed to have a few thicker or
thinner genes representing cannibalism” (ibid.: 120).
Whatever a Black man does or does not do – in the eyes
of White people he is and will always be first and
foremost a “nigger”: he speaks like a “nigger”, works like
a “nigger”, behaves in every respect like a “nigger”, and
even “nigger underwear smells of nigger”. The White
man makes life hell for the Black man: “I am locked in
the infernal circle” (ibid.: 116).
(b) Binarism: Racists divide the world into two absolutely
separate spheres (“apart-heid”): us and them – whether
they be Jews, Blacks, Chinese, Arabs or simply “the
native“, “breeding swarms […] of foulness, of spawn”
(Fanon, [1961] 2001: 33). “The colonial world is a
Manichaean world” (ibid.: 31), divided into those who
are superior and those who are subaltern. The White
man sees himself – his own flesh and blood, his own
mind and spirit – as “the triumph of the human
individual, of clarity and of beauty” (ibid.: 36). By
contrast “the Negro” is portrayed as absolutely negative:
“At times this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion
and dehumanizes the native, or to speak plainly it turns
him into an animal” (ibid.: 32). “He has no culture, no
civilization” (ibid.: 34). He is banished to “a zone of
nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region”
(ibid.: 10).
Drawing on Sartre, Fanon developed the first far-reaching
analysis of the problem addressed in Postcolonial Studies by
concepts such as hegemonic binarism and epistemic violence: the
binarism of Europe and its Others, of “the West and the Rest”, of
the vocal and the silent (Said, 1978; Hall, 1992a, 1996; Bhabha,
[1986] 2002). Linked to this is Fanon‘s pathbreaking critique of
western universalism and humanism: “the universal abstract”
actually consists of “the white man's values”, which are
hypostasized into “essential qualities” (Fanon, [1961] 2001:
33–36). Conversely an image of black inferiority is constructed
against which the White man can repeatedly confirm his
superiority (othering): by “primitivizing” the Black man, he
constructs a counter-figure, a “type” of half-human, half-animal
to which he attributes all manner of negative characteristics.
“The Negro is an animal, the Negro is bad, the Negro is mean,
the Negro is ugly” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 113). And what is
meant by this is definitely the Negro: “he is not a Negro but the
Negro” (ibid.: 127) — the Black man as a repulsive collective
object that induces fear and awakens fantasies of violence. He
serves as a blank space on which to project all kinds of
“orgiastic scenes, of unpunished rapes, of unrepressed incest”
(ibid.: 165) — as a mirror to the emotional abysses of the White
man. The Black man represents the Other of the White man,
just as in Simone de Beauvoir woman, in the eyes of man,
represents the other sex. “The Negro is a phobogenic object, a
stimulus to anxiety”, says Fanon, in deliberate reference to
Freud and Lacan (ibid.: 151).
And just as Lacan ([1973] 1990) says la femme n'existe pas,
so Fanon comes to a similar conclusion: le nègre n'existe pas.
“The Negro is not. Any more than the white man” (Fanon,
[1952] 2002: 231). Colonialism has destroyed Black cultures
and languages. Blacks exist only in the form of White
representations (othering); there is no other way for them (in
their otherness) to actively speak. Spivak (1988a) explicated
this problem in reference to subaltern women in India: The
subaltern cannot speak. Of course women and Black people can
speak — only: whatever they may say, their words are not
heeded. Women disappear in the linguistic representations of
men, they are only “available to the phallocentric tradition”
(ibid.: 287); “the voice of the other” as other is not audible
(ibid.: 284).
Subalterns have no language, no way of representing
themselves (ibid.: 275–276). Subalternity means “not-being-
able-to-make-speech acts” (Spivak, 1993: 290), being incapa-
ble of reciprocity, being “[un]able to be heard” (ibid.: 292).
Whenever and wherever they express themselves, subalterns
are silenced by virtue of the fact that their utterances “would
have to be interpreted in the way in which we historically
interpret anything” (ibid.: 291). Even absolute refusal, namely,
suicide, is interpreted as an expression of a “psychobiography
that I thought regulated” (ibid.), as Spivak says, referring to
Freud.
Colonialsm has destroyed Black people's languages and
eradicated their cultural roots, as Sartre, ([1948] 1964/65)
pointed out some time ago. Anything that may still remain is
rudimentary, or at any rate provides no framework for
otherness or for lasting gestures of liberation. These must be
articulated in French and English and must operate in the mode
of western universalism and humanism. Fanon agrees (his own
work is written in French) and concludes (clearly also
influenced by Wittgenstein): “A man who has a language
consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by
that language” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 18).
The cultural power of the colonists is first and foremost “the
power of language” (ibid.: 39), with which other languages and
linguistic representations of the Other are extinguished. It is by
means of language that colonialism has penetrated “into the
natives' heads”, leading to a “personality change” (Fanon,
[1961] 2001: 169, 200; [1952] 2002: 25). The language of the
colonial rulers re-shapes the habitus of the Black man, who no
longer speaks his mother tongue but the language of the
colonizers: “his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute
mutation” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 25, 19). Like Foucault after
him, Fanon had already addressed the physical aspect of power,
linked to the notion of micropower, which inserts its influence
into the smallest of gestures by means of language. A Black
man, when spoken to by a White man “like an adult with a
child” (secondary baby talk), is infantilized and inferiorized
(ibid.: 31). The subaltern cannot speak — really? We shall see.
Alienation and ageism
The old cannot speak — this is the powerful hypothesis
elaborated by Améry and de Beauvoir that parallels the
analyses of colonialism developed by Sartre via Fanon and
through to Spivak. People who have reached a certain age are
defined according to a specific conception of old age in a way
that follows the logic of racism. This is why it is possible to
speak of ageism in analogy to racism, as Butler (1969) did,
though without any reference to Sartre. The term itself cannot
be found in Améry and de Beauvoir, and yet their writings
contain the most profound analyses of ageism available to us to
date — starting out from the two main aspects of the
existentialist critique of the gaze: essentialism and binarism.
 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
(a) Essentialism: Beneath the “gaze of the others” old people
appear as “creatures of total social determination”
(Améry, [1968] 1994: 67). Ageism involves defining the
characteristics and behaviours of old people as essen-
tially pre-determined by processes of decline. Beneath
this gaze the process of ageing is perceived to be a path
determined by fate, “and it quickly becomes steeper and
steeper, faster and faster”, as a matter of biological
inevitability (ibid.: 14–17, 51).
(b) Binarism: “it is old age, rather than death, that is to be
contrasted with life” (de Beauvoir [1970] 1996: 539).
Améry speaks of a radical binarism between young and
old, which is effectively a complete “annihilation of the
aging human being” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 68). Using
age as an example, de Beauvoir and Améry reformulate
the great Manichaeistic division of the world spoken of by
Sartre and Fanon. While racism is based on the key
differences Jew/Aryan, Black/White, ageism is based on
the key difference of old/not-old, or old/young.
“It is within the context of life as a whole that the hierarchy
of the different ages is established” (de Beauvoir, [1970] 1996:
11). The human being in his unlimited power to produce and
reproduce forms the universal measure of all human things
(age imperialism; Biggs, 2004) — and anyone who cannot keep
up cannot help but seem old. The key difference old/not-old
gives rise to vastly different ascriptions of value and worth: on
the one side there is youth(fulness), health and strength — and
on the other old age, illness and weakness (Améry, [1968]
1994: 14–15, 32–33); on the one side there are unlimited life
opportunities — on the other, a closed-off world, an
extinguishing of opportunities. Whereas in other phases of
growing older there is talk of rich possibilities, of development
and becoming, this is no longer the case with old people:
“Society no longer brings the possibilities into focus that we
still think are vouchsafed to us in the picture that it makes of
us” (ibid.: 55). Simone de Beauvoir spoke of de-humanization:
old people are regarded as “throw-outs”, as “walking corpses”
(de Beauvoir, [1970] 1996: 6). Améry ([1968] 1994: 102)
speaks of a “state of putrefaction” and of a “cadaver”. This
applies in a “dangerously abrupt” and doubly cruel way to older
women; they are inferiorized both as women and as old people
(ibid.: 547; cf. Sontag, 1972).
Old people encounter negation at every turn. Even in places
where there is talk of the potential of old age, old people appear
as “creatures without potential” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 55).
Criteria of deviance and deficiency apply here too. The others,
as old people discover, “have struck a balance and laid before us
a bottom line that we are” (ibid.: 55). People observe how
active, productive and vital old people (still) are: they
“[calculate] it automatically according to the inventory sum”
(ibid.: 57). Still active or no longer active? How small or large
are the deviations from the norm of vitality? Even the best ager
has the grimace of the worst written on their face (ibid.: 68:
“here is what already bears the sign of nothingness on its
brow”).
Viewed in terms of the key difference between old and not-
old, old age appears merely as an Other to youth(fulness), if not
to life per se. In noting this, Simone de Beauvoir applied a basic
aspect of her theory of gender to old age: “the view of society”
(de Beauvoir, [1970] 1996: 550) is directed “at holding up the
87
elderly man as someone who is different, as another being”
(ibid.: 3) — old age as an inferior, subaltern phase of life.
Youth(fulness), by contrast, embodies all that must be: the
“absolute human type” (de Beauvoir, [1949] 2010: 15). Just as
in Fanon “the White man” is “the Subject”, “the Absolute”, so in
de Beauvoir youth(fulness) is the same. Old age is the Other per
se.
The ageist gaze presents and represents old age as the
bewildering Other, indeed virtually as that which is incapable of
being spoken of and discussed. Alienation is the term coined by
Améry ([1968] 1994: 93) to refer to this form of alienation and
othering. It is a form of othering, which constitutes old age as a
negative foil to preferred values and norms. Jew/Aryan, Black/
White, old/youth — it is all the same binarism, determinism,
totalitarianism, the same vitalism, essentialism and biopolitical
style, the same asymmetry between superiority and
subalternity. Liveliness, health, strength, tautness, beauty —
Améry and de Beauvoir demonstrate in the prevailing “idolatry
of youth” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 54) the existence of those “vital
values” which Sartre ([1944] 1995: 86–87) had identified as
racist ideals of life and which Fanon ([1961] 2001: 35–36) had
shown to be colonialistic “phraseology”, “collections of dead
words” used to deceive those colonized.
Open gaze: reflection and responsibility
Racism and ageism condemn people to subalternity and
speechlessness — this is the realistic observation made by
Fanon as well as by Améry and de Beauvoir, drawing on Sartre's
work. Speechlessness means: no matter what an old person
says or does, no notice is taken of him. The “look of the others”
goes right through him “as if he were a transparent substance”;
it condemns him to “invisibility” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 68–69).
And ‘realistic’ means: “one should not fool oneself” (ibid.: 127),
because the “negation in the look of the others” (ibid.: 77)
cannot be overcome: “The doors will not be opened any more”
(ibid.: 64), says Améry, alluding to Sartre's No Exit. This
negativity in Améry's understanding is very similar to the
position adopted most prominently by Spivak (1988a) in
Postcolonial Studies. In both cases, the fundamental nature of
the negation is highlighted realistically as a constitutive feature
of subalternity. De profundis clamo: Can the subaltern speak?
Can the old speak?
Améry argued in more radical terms even than Spivak, who
later corrects herself, calling for “a responsibility structure […]
with responses flowing both ways” (Spivak, 1993: 293). In
other words, one can consider two positions from which to
challenge the cycle of subalternity: from the outside and from
the inside. From the outside, it is the path of “accountable
reason” (ibid.: 297) that overcomes epistemic violence. Sartre
grounded this possibility of opening to the experience of the
Other in existential terms, while de Beauvoir reclaimed it in
relation to issues of age and aging. Lévinas, however, has
responded critically and thereby developed a line of argument
which (via Derrida) has become central to Postcolonial Studies.
From the inside: these are hybrid, unstable ways by which
subalterns can make themselves heard. In Postcolonial Studies
it is Fanon and, more recently, Homi Bhabha who elaborate
these possibilities. Améry has explored them in relation to old
people, using Camus to conjure an absurd conceptual sleight of
hand. Sections 4 and 5 address postcolonial explanations of
88 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
alterity – which can, however, be read as a possibility of aging
differently. Sections 6, 7 and 8 address issues to do with old age,
posed from a postcolonial studies perspective.
Racism and ageism operate by determining other people's
characteristics in an essentialist manner. This happens from
outside and from above, from a hegemonic standpoint, as
Sartre says, going on to posit a fundamental countercritique:
“there is no determinism” (Sartre, [1946] 2007: 29). In social
and cultural life “we can never explain our actions by reference
to a given and immutable human nature” (ibid.). Sartre thus
highlights a radical alternative: existentialist openness versus
the deterministic closedness of the gaze. Only the open gaze
allows people to appear in their otherness (alterity). But how is
such an opening of the gaze possible? Sartre explains this
possibility by reference to the basic idea of his philosophy: “the
complete arbitrariness of existence” (ibid.: 49) and by
returning to the origins of (western) Enlightenment, the
Cartesian cogito (ibid.: 41).
This is the basic human situation: there is nothing that
“compels man to commit certain acts” (Sartre, [1946] 2007:
29). The human gaze has no other reason for being than what
humans create out of nothing. This describes the starting point
for “another meaning to the word ‘humanism’” (ibid.: 52):
“This is humanism because we remind man that there is no
legislator other than himself and that he must, in his
abandoned state, make his own choices, and also because we
show that it is not by turning inward, but by constantly seeking
a goal outside of himself in the form of liberation, or of some
special achievement, that man will realize himself as truly
human” (ibid.: 53). The open gaze works within the conscious-
ness of that which characterizes human existence, namely, the
ability to “surpass limitations” – not least with respect to other
people (ibid.: 52, 42).
Sartre explores this open-ended character of human
existence more closely by referring to the cogito, which of
course is simultaneously also a dubito: I doubt and think,
therefore I am — “human” (ibid.: 40–41; Sartre, [1948] 1964/
65: 15–16). The distance created by doubt is what underlies
that which is human: a human being can doubt everything; she
can hesitate, waver, and, above all, she can think before she
acts. She can choose between different options, and she can
give reasons for her decisions, re-think them, change them,
negotiate anew. In one respect, however, she has no choice: she
cannot choose not to doubt. The cogito is “the absolute truth of
consciousness confronting itself” (Sartre, [1946] 2007: 40). The
cogito is the anti-essentialist essence of human existence.
Racists refuse doubt. Adopting a closed gaze means treating
people “as objects, which is to say as a set of predetermined
reactions” (ibid.: 41). It is a gaze “wherein one becomes only
what he already was” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 13). „We are now in
a position to understand the anti-Semite. He is a man who is
afraid. Not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself, of his own
consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibil-
ities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and of the world — of
everything except the Jews.“ (ibid.: 38). He does not want to
accept that people determine their own consciousness. In this
way he offloads the responsibility for his decisions and actions
onto some other authority. Taking responsibility, however,
means regulating the gaze from the outside onto others in such
a way that people no longer make one another the “victim of the
judgments” they utter (Sartre, 1973: 62, author's translation).
What Sartre has in mind when he speaks of regulating the
gaze is opening to the experience of the Other. This gaze takes
responsibility for its actions to the extent that it acts
paradoxically, namely, by regulating itself and thereby con-
stantly maintaining the possibility of deregulating (doubting)
itself. This gaze offers open-mindedness – also in the sense of
relativism – to the closed-off machinations of racism. It behaves
responsibly because it “knows that his reasoning is no more
than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast
doubt on it” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 12). And it behaves
responsibly by remaining aware – despite all projects and
decisions – “that I must will the freedom of others” (Sartre,
[1946] 2007: 49). This gaze senses rather than knowing for
sure: “He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is
‘open’” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 12). Responsible people act “as if
their own existence were in continual suspension” (ibid.).
The cogito suspends its power, its epistemic violence in the
sense of accountable reason. It is this idea that Lévinas has
developed into a phenomenology of responsibility, albeit one
associated with a fundamental critique of Sartre. Lévinas's ideas
begin from a position of epistemic ambiguity: on the one hand
we need the cogito in order to set clear limits to the
“thematizing, objectifying, and indiscreet eye” (Lévinas, 2000:
128). Lévinas appeals for a responsibility structure — not least in
the form of basic rights, laws and institutions (ibid.: 202–203).
On the other hand, he cautions: under “the gaze of reflective
consciousness” the Other is not present but is rather repre-
sented. It appears within its concept and not in its absolute
difference, its “alterity” (ibid.: 142, 132). Recalling Horkheimer
and Adorno’s critique of the Enlightenment ([1947] 2002),
Lévinas declares: “The activity of thought triumphs over all
otherness” (Lévinas, 2000: 126). “It remains […] a reduction of
the other to the same” (ibid.: 173–174).
In a similar vein Spivak (drawing on Derrida) has spoken
polemically of the naïve desire of critical intellectuals to “be in
touch with the speaking subaltern” (Spivak, 1993: 292). She
turns fiercely on (of all people!) Foucault and Deleuze, “who
choose a ‘naturally articulate’ subject of oppression” (Spivak,
1988a: 289). Even well-meaning and appreciative interest in
the subaltern turns out to be “interested blindness” (Derrida,
[1967] 1997: 80; Spivak, 1988a: 293), if not epistemic violence,
especially among those “who become spokespersons for
subalternity” (Spivak, 1993: 292). This is the dialectic of
postcolonial reason: it operates from the outside and in doing
so places itself (the cogito, the inside) at the centre: “each time
that ethnocentrism is precipitately and ostentatiously reversed,
some effort silently hides behind all the spectacular effects to
consolidate an inside and to draw from it some domestic
benefit” (Derrida [1967] 1997: 80; Spivak, 1999: 281).
Black gaze: hybridity and instability
It is clear that Fanon himself recognized this dialectic when
he counters Sartre's view thus: even accountable reason
behaves colonialistically when it expounds the programme of
responsibility in a paternalistic manner. “Thus my unreason
was countered with reason” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 132), and I
was the loser every time. Spivak summarized this set of
problems succinctly as follows: “white men, seeking to save
brown women from brown men” (Spivak, 1988a: 305).
Additionally, however, Fanon recognized that even
 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
existentialist humanism tempted him to “[take] myself far off
from my own presence, far indeed”, namely, into the light of
the White gaze (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 112). Sartre robs me of
“my last chance” (ibid.: 133) to constitute “the black con-
sciousness” (ibid.: 134). Refusing the fundamental western
cogito, Fanon explains: “I analyzed my heredity” (ibid.: 132).
Fanon distrusts Sartre's approach of breaking through the
circle of subalternity from outside and above: is it not thus,
he asks, that new (if more subtle) forms of representation by
others come about? Thus Fanon focuses on breaking the
circle of subaltenity from the inside and from the bottom.
How might a “Black gaze” develop beneath the hegemony of
the “White gaze”? How can subalterns speak? And what do
they have to say? — Fanon posed this question in a way that
has lost none of its poignancy and relevance even today:
“Where am I to be classified?” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 113).
What can one invoke in order to mark out Black positions?
What else can this Blackness be other than “the Negro
recognized, set on his feet again, sought after, taken up”
(ibid.: 127)? In like manner, Améry and de Beauvoir asked:
What else can old people do given the “plague” (Camus) of
representation from the outside? In both cases the answer
lies in a hybrid figure of argumentation: in saying no and yes
at the same time (Améry, [1968] 1994: 76).
Just as Hall (1991, 1992b) did later on, Fanon refers to Black
origins out of which a counter-hegemonic position can be
fashioned and justified. In doing so he sets himself up against
Sartre, to the extent that the latter had spoken of the
extinguished Black soul, culture and language (Sartre, [1948]
1964/65: 20–21). At the same time, though, he concedes that
we can learn from Sartre “that the first impulse of the black
man is to say no to those who attempt to build a definition of
him” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 36). This is initially an impulse, an
unarticulated, shouted-out no!, with which otherness makes
itself noticeable de profundis: “the great Negro cry” (ibid.: 134).
But how is such a shout that breaks through the hegemonic
circle possible? Fanon grounds this possibility in a way one
might refer to as “hybrid” (Bhabha, 1994). In other words,
Fanon sees no one-dimensional or monocausal context; instead
he speaks of a complex of different possibilities that can range
from the shout to the articulation of otherness.
One point of departure is the sheer suffering with which
Sartre himself had justified the anti-racist no!. The no! becomes
more than just a shout when it starts to undermine the colonial
language and to create “obvious symbols” for “the anxieties of
the colonized native” (Sartre, [1948] 1964/65: 21). But not even
an articulated no! is sufficient, according to Fanon, unless it is
accompanied by a fundamental yes!. Once again Fanon follows
one of Sartre’s lines of thinking. Using a striking and
controversial dictum, Sartre had highlighted another possibility
of Black positioning: “anti-racist racism” (ibid.: 18, 47). In other
words, Blackness constitutes itself in a “moment of separation
or negativity” (ibid.: 18). This refers to the insistence on race,
on essential positions, which are strategically necessary in
order, on the one hand, to negate colonialism and, on the other,
to constitute and affirm positions of liberation: “this anti-racist
racism is the only road that will lead to the abolition of racial
differences” (ibid.). The Black person adopts the racist “word
‘nigger’ which was thrown at him like a stone, he draws himself
erect and proudly proclaims himself a black man, face to face
with white men” (ibid.).
89
Taking this as a starting point, Fanon develops ideas that are
discussed nowadays in terms of “strategic essentialism”
(Spivak, 1988b): “I took up my negritude” (Fanon, [1952]
2002: 138), grasped it in its essential fullness. The Black person
must immerse him or herself “in the night of the absolute”; this
is “the only condition to attain to consciousness of self”. The
Black man “draws [his] worth from an almost substantive
absoluteness” (ibid.: 133–134): “the meaning that was already
there, pre-existing, waiting for me” (ibid.: 134) — “black
consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a
potentiality of something, I am wholly what I am” (ibid.:
135). Well-versed in psychoanalysis (and like Bhabha, 1994,
after him), Fanon includes the unconscious and the culturally
uncanny (the supposedly irrational) in his argument in order to
highlight the ambiguities of alienation and to justify indepen-
dent positions from which to speak.
However, Fanon pursues a hybrid project of articulation:
strategic essentialism forms only one aspect in a series of equal
possibilities for situating and positioning a “Black gaze”. Another
possibility lies in drawing on Black languages and traditions,
myths and rituals. Fanon suggests that a Black person might
consciously draw upon “the history of my district or of my tribe”
(Fanon, [1961] 2001: 43). This includes finding a Black habitus
that one might describe in terms of coolness: “a kind of interior
restabilization acquires a stony calm” (ibid.: 42; see
Zimmermann & Grebe, 2014). Contradicting Sartre, Fanon
stresses the possibility of referring to cultural origins, however
rudimentary or merely fictitious their (re-)narration may be. In
doing so, Fanon directs the same critique at Sartre from a Black
perspective as that which has been expressed from a Jewish
one — most prominently by Hannah Arendt ([1951] 2004: 8–9):
Jewish self-consciousness was never “a mere creation of
antisemitism; even a cursory knowledge of Jewish history,
whose central concern since the Babylonian exile has always
been the survival of the people against the overwhelming odds
of dispersion, should be enough to dispel this latest myth in
these matters, a myth that has become somewhat fashionable in
intellectual circles after Sarte's ‘existentialist’ interpretation of
the Jew as someone who is regarded and defined as a Jew by
others.”
Thus, as with Jewish history, “the” Black experience consists
of a huge variety of traditions, languages, cultures and religions.
Fanon directs his critique at postcolonial conceptions of culture
which “freeze” the issue of ethnicity and difference (Hall, 1991)
and retreat into a notion of sameness. It is precisely when it is a
matter of facilitating Black self-images that the following
applies: “culture is moving” and it opens “the doors of creation”
(Fanon, [1961] 2001: 197). In questions of identity one cannot
be certain of oneself. It is misleading “to lose myself completely
in negritude” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 135). Instead of “closing off
a door to communication” (Fanon, [1961] 2001: 199), cultures
must engage in a “renewing of forms of expression and the
rebirth of imagination” (ibid.: 197) — not least of all in a process
of exchange with other cultures.
Fanon eventually developed the idea of hybridity at the
level of epistemology: “I do not have to look for the universal”
(Fanon, [1952] 2002: 135), and nonetheless I can give Black
culture(s) “a universal dimension” (Fanon, [1961] 2001: 198).
This both/and approach is certainly possible: “In this colonialist
context there is no truthful behavior” (ibid.: 39). In order to
combat the various specific forms of oppression, what is
90 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
needed is “a series of local engagements” (ibid.: 113). This is
why as many different alternatives must be developed and
negotiated locally: “Consciousness slowly dawns upon truths
that are only partial, limited and unstable” (ibid.: 117; on this
point, see Bhabha, [1988] 2006). Determining once and for all
that the subaltern cannot speak would thus be to reduce
postcolonial perspectives to a uniform singularity. Whether or
not subalterns can speak cannot be decided once and for all: it
will become apparent depending on each situation and context
and position in the edifice of subalternity.
Subalternity and old age: representation, resignation,
rebellion
Racism and ageism amount to the same thing: “alienation”
and “negation in the look of the others” (Améry, [1968] 1994:
77; similarly, de Beauvoir, [1970] 1996: 3–7). Just as colonized
peoples are denied the “world”, so, too, are old people. Young
people are told that “the world is open” (Améry, [1968] 1994:
14), whereas for old people there is nothing but “an empty
place” (ibid.: 61), “a desolate region of life” (ibid.: 127). Even in
his choice of words Améry agrees with Fanon, who had spoken
of “a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid
region” (Fanon, [1952] 2002: 10). Can the old speak? This
possibility can (as in postcolonial discourse) be considered
from two angles: from the outside and from the inside. De
Beauvoir primarily explores the former while Améry, along
with Camus, takes the latter route.
De Beauvoir argues just as confidently as Sartre, who states:
“Whatever vicious circle we are in, I think we are free to break
out of it” (Sartre, 1973: 62, author’s translation). Sometimes a
simple change of perspective is enough to open people’s eyes,
says de Beauvoir: “let us recognize ourselves in this old man or
in that old woman” (de Beauvoir, [1970] 1996: 5). The
imperative of empathy calls us each and every day to share
responsibility for other people; meanwhile, existentialist
‘know-how’ enables us to re-code our gaze by realizing: “The
fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than
all the peculiarities” (de Beauvoir, [1949] 2010; 684), such as
those of gender, race and class – or, indeed, age. This fact is
rooted in people’s ability to re-fashion themselves repeatedly
in new and different ways. Ageism is to be overcome by a
liberating gaze that “[leaves] a wide range of possibilities open
to the individual” (de Beauvoir, [1970] 1996: 543) — at any and
every age.
In contrast to this, Améry (like Spivak later on) held such
optimism to be naïve. Ageism is a totalitarian regime. It brings
about a “total eclipse of the whole scene” (Améry, [1968] 1994:
58), because what is being negated is the very thing that
characterizes the conditio humana per se according to existen-
tialist ontology: “the existence of permanent becoming” (ibid.:
62), the possibility of “going beyond a possible limit” (ibid.: 59).
Ageism is not only a matter of extremely asymmetric relation-
ships but indeed a negation of existence in old age itself. To put
it another way, it is an “exclusionary matrix” (Butler, 1993:
xiii). Old people are allocated to “a domain of abject beings”
(ibid.), of those who are “refused the possibility of cultural
articulation” (ibid.: xvii). Old age thus constitutes a prime
example of the situation that has been described in Postcolonial
Studies as subalternity. Old people within western culture (and
not only here) are those who are “not […] able to represent
themselves” (Spivak, 1993: 307). “They are as society pre-
scribes: what they are, a nothing” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 77).
The circle of negation is closed so tightly that any disruption
from outside is highly unlikely, according to Améry. And the
same goes for the inside: “their rebellion [...] is condemned to
failure” (ibid.: 76). While Spivak (1988a: 290–291), like Fanon,
concedes there are gradations of failure and subalternity,
Améry goes even further still, describing old age as a life
phase of absolute subalternity. Social, cultural and gender
differentiations, among others, are bracketed out by the
phenomenological maxim “one should not fool oneself”
(Améry, [1968] 1994: 127). The ‘actual’ condition of old age
must be shown without any illusions, reduced to the heart of
the problem: the “an-nihilation” of existence: the old cannot
speak. – In a further step, Améry does not stop at this analysis
‘from the outside’ but transfers the maxim of phenomenolog-
ical reduction to one of inner conduct: each individual in old
age must be “present [...] to the inevitable” (ibid.: 76). This is
the meaning of resignation as formulated previously and
fundamentally by Sartre: resignation means “my being-as-
object or being-for-others” (Sartre, [1943] 1992: 365). “I am in
a world which the Other has made alien to me” (ibid.: 350). To
be resigned means to accept that “when the Other describes my
character, I do not ‘recognize’ myself and yet I know that ‘it is
me’. I accept the responsibility for the stranger who is
presented to me, but he does not cease to be a stranger”
(ibid.: 366).
Old people who face their situation without illusions in this
way are taking responsibility for themselves. They do not “lose
themselves in the it's-all-the-same-to-me of a normalcy
without self, nor do they look for refuge in the madhouse, nor
do they deceive themselves with a mask of youth, nor with a
deeply deceiving idyll of aging” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 77).
Resignation is called for: as a technology of self-care, as an
economy of existence (Foucault, 1986) that is capable of
managing its own energies in a responsible way. Améry alludes
to the original sense of the Latin word resignare. It means
“unseal”, “release”, “render invalid”. Those who are resigned
are accepting the judgment of other people: “the acceptance is
an affirmation of something irrevocable” (Améry, [1968] 1994:
76). Any yet it is precisely through this acceptance that an old
person frees and distances him or herself from the “negation in
the look of the others” (ibid.: 77). As Fanon does in relation to
the colonial self, so too Améry refers to the possibility of
resistance by means of being reserved, by maintaining one's
cool. Being resigned means disdaining other people's power to
judge, letting it roll off them like water off a duck's back, as it
were.
By referring to this possibility of a resigned attitude as one
of subaltern style, Améry is simultaneously highlighting the
possibility of rebellion. This does not involve subalterns
suddenly appearing as speaking subjects, however. Rather,
rebellion begins at the zero point of resignation. Old people “are
as society prescribes: what they are, a nothing, and yet in the
recognition of being nothing still something” (ibid.: 77). This
means that in resignation, in the acknowledgement of their
nothingness something fundamentally different comes into
being than merely this “being nothing”. To some extent this is
the rudimentary function of what, in Sartre's account, consti-
tutes the great position of a speaking subject: the cogito. Old
people – subalterns – transgress the limits of nothingness by
 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
facing them with a speechless act of acceptance. Old people
“make their negation in the look of the others into something of
their own and rise up against it. They embark on an enterprise
that cannot be accomplished. That is their chance and is,
perhaps, the only possibility they have of truly aging with
dignity” (ibid.).
Old Sisyphus speaks: no! and yes!
Améry is interested in acts of subaltern resignation and
rebellion that go on within the circle of negation. In this way he
applies to old age the programme of “the absurd man“, for
which Camus ([1942] 2013: 57) with his Myth of Sisyphus has
coined a memorable symbol, extending it into the space of
subalternity in the process. Absurdity here stands for a hybrid
undertaking: old people “say no to an-nihilation and at the
same time yes to it, for only in this futile denial can one present
oneself at all as oneself to the inevitable” (Améry, [1968] 1994:
76).
In “the whole extent of his wretched condition” (Camus,
[1942] 2013: 117) Sisyphus is speechless, like every subaltern:
he is burdened with “that unspeakable penalty in which the
whole being is exerted towards accomplishing nothing” (ibid.:
116). He experiences daily the failure of every rebellion (ibid.:
31–32), his life consists of nothing but meaninglessness (ibid.:
84–85). This meaninglessness, Camus says, might not be
perceived or even felt, were it not “that it bursts from the
comparison [...] between an action and the world that
transcends it. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in
neither of the elements compared; it is born of their
confrontation” (ibid.: 28–29). Absurdity is a differentiated
matter: it arises in the case of the subaltern person through a
comparison between speaking and hearing, through the
experience that all speaking is meaningless if it is not heard
(Spivak, 1993: 292–293). It arises in the case of the old person
through comparison between affirmation and rejection,
through the experience that the self “is annihilated by empty
stares” (ibid.: 69), and that a “normalcy without self” is
“condemning A. to invisibility” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 69, 77).
Améry sketches a de-selfed self. This self is capable of
experiencing the absurdity of existence in old age simply on the
basis of a bodily comparison. This is “a man's attachment to
life”, which is “stronger than all the ills in the world. The body's
judgement is as good as the mind's and the body shrinks from
annihilation” (Camus, [1942] 2013: 6). Camus and Améry thus
develop an anti-essentialist essentialism: ultimately it is not
the cogito from which rebellion emerges — it is life, albeit not
lived in the sense of “having” it, as an established possession,
but rather as “an existence of becoming” (Améry, [1968] 1994:
62–63). The rebellion of the old person is based on a felt
ambivalence, on the feeling that “the look of the others” is “the
look that represents the world of having possessions”, “that his
existence without having, the existence of permanent becom-
ing, has been stolen from him by an existence prescribed by
having” (ibid.).
However, there is no elimination of the contradiction, no
leap, no revolution (Camus, [1942] 2013: 29–32). The absurdity
of existence (in old age) can only be met with resignation. This
means, on the one hand, with acceptance and, on the other, with
rebellion. Améry refers to a further meaning of the Latin word
resignare: re-define, re-coin, re-signify. Re-signation entails a
91
change of perspectives: “Understanding the world for a man is
reducing it to the human, stamping it with his seal” (Améry,
[1968] 1994, 15–16). Old age proves its “own difference and […]
diversity” (ibid.) in the rebellion against “empty stares”, against
“invisibility”, and against “the negation consummated by society,
the an-nihilation of the aging human being” (ibid.: 68–69). What
this means is an initially speechless and unaware, powerless
undertaking, a fundamental impulse of life and of the body:
“Even humiliated, the flesh is my only certainty. I can live only on
it. The creature is my native land. This is why I have chosen this
absurd and ineffectual effort. This is why I am on the side of the
struggle” (Camus, [1942] 2013: 85).
Yet this is clearly where Camus and Améry do not stand,
because ultimately they believe after all in a subject capable of
speaking and acting and in its victory (as Spivak, Foucault and
Deleuze point out). Camus and Améry stand on the side of
struggle because they do not believe in the “pure subaltern”
(Spivak, 1993: 289). To put it in Bhabha's (1994) terms: they
transfer the binarism of affirmation and rejection, recognition
and nihilation to a space of hybridity. According to Sartre this is
a mode of “continual suspension” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 12),
which does not become weaker “by denying one of the terms of
its equation” (Camus, [1942] 2013: 48). Hybridity means
constituting one's identity in a third space and “[remaining]
on that dizzying crest — that is integrity and the rest is
subterfuge” (ibid.).
It is this hybrid way of living (in continual suspension) that
Améry reclaims for old age. The important thing is to meet the
absurdity of existence in old age with a “balance of fear and
confidence, rebellion and resignation, refusal and acceptance”
(Améry, [1968] 1994: 123) — a truly Sisyphean task. Old
Sisyphus “says yes and his effort will henceforth be unceasing”
(Camus, [1942] 2013: 119). “His rock is his thing” (ibid.: 118), it
is his rolling “enterprise that cannot be accomplished” (Améry,
[1968] 1994: 77). We can imagine the work of old Sisyphus as a
hybrid process: each stopping point of the rock he is pushing
uphill represents a moment of suspension, a precarious balance
in the process of moving between up and down, between
rebellion and rejection. Although he experiences with his own
body that the rock repeatedly negates all his efforts, old
Sisyphus nonetheless does not see himself as “the absurd hero”
(Camus, [1942] 2013: 116). Rather he is subject to fluctuating
feelings. He himself rolls backwards and forwards, as it were,
seeking to maintain balance by asking himself time and time
again: How does it feel? To be without a home. Like a complete
unknown. Like a rolling stone?
“The rock is still rolling” (Camus, [1942] 2013: 119). But old
Sisyphus does not remain on his own; he “makes of fate a
human matter, which must be settled among men” (ibid.: 118).
The matter must be negotiated anew over and over again in the
space of hybridity (Bhabha, 1994). The rebellion wrests the
individual from his loneliness: “I rebel — therefore we exist”
(Camus, [1951] 1992: 22).
La vieillesse n'existe pas
Rebellion – despite constant failure – means constantly
refusing to accept “cultural alienation” (ibid.: 93). This happens
of its own accord from within the circle of subalterns, as Camus
(ibid.: 22) argues, less on the basis of the cogito than on the
basis of “a man's attachment to life” (Camus, [1942] 2013: 6).
92 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
The cogito has a precise meaning only “within our own Western
society” (Camus, [1951] 1992: 20). For other cultures “the idea
of rebellion has no meaning” (ibid.: 20). Rebellion cannot be
reduced to the mind and to cogito: “Analysis of rebellion leads
at least to the suspicion that, contrary to the postulates of
contemporary thought, a human nature does exist” (ibid.: 16);
it is “a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of
power” (ibid.: 250). This bond that ties us to life, understood as
the being of becomings,1 as “living transcendence” (ibid.: 258),
forms the anti-essentialist essence used by Camus to argue
“that rebellion is one of the essential dimensions of man” (ibid.:
21). Even if other terms are used and other reasons are given —
rebellion is a universal phenomenon: “it reveals the part of man
which must always be defended” (ibid.: 19).
Rebellion is the “movement of life” (Camus, [1951] 1992:
304). It rises up against the “calculated revolution which, in
preferring an abstract concept of man to a man of flesh and
blood, denies existence” (ibid.: 397). Thus Camus (of all
people!) sees in anti-essentialism a linchpin of the “murderous
and immoderate mechanism” (ibid.: 305) of western thought:
it fails to recognize that rebellion does not emerge out of “an
abstract ideal” but rather out of the tragedy of life itself, out of a
tension between life and death (ibid.: 19). A straightforward
anti-essentialism thus stands par excellence for the “sterility of
the world”, for “a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of
things” (ibid.: 22). Rebellion, by contrast, is “an appeal to the
essence of being” (ibid.: 105) — an appeal which nonetheless
falls everywhere on (not least anti-essentialist) deaf ears.
The evil that has befallen these ears is a “mass plague”
(Camus, [1951] 1992: 22). Can this “plague” be overcome? Can
the subaltern voices ever get through? Can old people ever
raise their voices loudly? — This is a question of “receptivity and
the will to receive”, replies Améry, who thus considers the
possibility of disrupting the circle of negation from the outside
(Améry, [1968] 1994: 92). It is a matter of the subalterns being
heard. According to Spivak there are two preconditions for this:
first, the deconstruction of a gaze or listening ears that
extinguish “the trace of that other” (Spivak, 1988a: 281) and,
second, establishing a “responsibility structure” (Spivak, 1993:
293). In both points Spivak is drawing on Derrida. But even
Sartre, Camus and Améry have come up with ways of keeping
“the ethnocentric Subject from establishing itself by selectively
defining an Other” (othering) (Spivak, 1988a: 292). The issue of
“responsibility”, however, is a reference not only to Derrida but
also, above all, to Lévinas.
A responsibility structure cannot be developed and main-
tained through the power of the cogito (western reason) alone —
this is the basic idea shared by Lévinas, Derrida and Spivak alike.
As Camus argues, such a structure requires a different experience
of the Other. It is a moment in which “a man identifies himself
with other men and so surpasses himself” (Camus, [1942] 2013:
17). Camus outlines a mode of suddenness: a “sudden, dazzling
perception” (ibid.: 14). This is the sense in which Spivak (1988a:
308) (like Fanon) speaks of “impulse” and (citing Derrida) of an
“‘appeal’ to or ‘call’ to the ‘quite other’” (ibid.: 294). Appeal, call —
in Camus and Lévinas (as in Heidegger before them) this is
directed against talk: talk about the Other is an obstacle to
listening to him. It is not a completed sentence by which the
1
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is” (Camus, 1951: 11).
Other is apprehended. Spivak is not talking about “‘letting the
other(s) speak for” themselves. Rather, it is no more and no less
than an impulse, which challenges us, “rendering delirious that
interior voice that is the voice of the other in us” (Derrida, 1982:
71; Spivak, 1988a: 294).
The call is a call to become “delirious”, understood in the
sense of the Latin word delirare: emerging from the ploughed
furrow, stepping out of line, moving away from the main-
stream, doing something crazy (dissident) — and thereby
suddenly experiencing something quite different. By positing
this call Derrida comes very close to Lévinas's phenomenology of
responsibility which is increasingly being cited in gerontological
circles of late (Brinkmann, 2008; Klie, 2014; Kruse, 2014;
Zimmermann, 2015). Finding a way to reach or understand the
Other must be done differently, not in the cogito. Lévinas seeks
to describe something that eludes “a limine, through its lapse,
all activity of representation” (Lévinas, 2000: 143), but which
can be apprehended nonetheless. It is an “ethical ‘event’” (ibid.:
202), which ”uproots me from the solid ground” (ibid.: 148):
an “eruption of the face into the phenomenal order of the
appearance” (ibid.: 145).
“Face in its straightforwardness of facing things” is the
“original locus” in which, according to Lévinas, the non-
representable “present” appears (ibid.: 145, 129) – be it in the
form of a “call”, an “appeal” or a “bad conscience” (ibid.: 132,
227, 148). What is meant is an experience of presence “without
intentions, without aims” (ibid.: 129). At this moment “the I” is
rid “of its sovereignty of self” (ibid.: 132); the Other can be
experienced in “the inviolability of its logical and ontological
privilege” (before the subject) (ibid.). It is a sudden “summons
to responsibility” (ibid.: 147), which challenges us to take
“responsibility for the other” (ibid.: 202). The call to responsi-
bility comes from “the face of the other man as being the
original locus of the meaningful” (ibid.: 145). However, this
experience still has to be grounded subsequently, as Lévinas
himself does in his account. The “eruption of the face” (ibid.)
would be without consequence if the cogito were not to
participate, if there were no rational framing or universal
ethical grounding.
What is needed, then, is accountable reason that makes it
possible to enter into a responsibility structure with others, a
structure “with responses flowing both ways” (Spivak, 1993:
136). This would be (as Bhabha, 1994, points out) a hybrid
space of (more or less) symmetrical processes of communica-
tion and negotiation. In this space a process of “unlearning”
would be possible, says Spivak (1988a: 296), a release from
“this quick-fix frenzy” — including, incidentally, from solutions
“of doing good with an implicit assumption of cultural
supremacy which is legitimized by unexamined romanticiza-
tion” (Spivak, 1993: 293).
This postcolonial programme is almost exactly in line with
Améry's ideas about dissidence in old age, which similarly
argue against romanticizing the process of aging and making
pre-emptive references to the heterogeneity of ways of aging.
Like Spivak and Lévinas, Améry too appealed for a responsibility
structure to disrupt the processes of “alienation” and “negation”
of old age and to break through the othering of old age once and
for all. According to Améry this would be an ordering of the
gaze in which the constitution of even the oldest person “would
remain an existence of becoming: to be and to become with the
others whose look would not overpower him, but instead
 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
would help him again and again to be zero and to constitute
himself a new starting from the zero point” (Améry, [1968]
1994: 62–63). Such a gaze would operate beyond the key
difference of old/not-old. Old age would, to an extent, no longer
be an issue, in the sense expressed by de Beauvoir thus: “We
may dream that in the ideal society that I have just spoken of
old age would be virtually non-existent” (de Beauvoir, [1970]
1996: 543).
La vieillesse n'existe pas — the absurd sleight of hand
achieved by Améry and de Beauvoir corresponds closely to a
dictum of Lacan's. The great alienating narratives of “the
woman”, “the Negro”, “the old man” no longer exist when the
Other is given priority. Within this responsibility structure
gerontology in particular would be called to engage in a
paradoxical form of self-transgression: to no longer address the
very issue that is its main concern: old age. Gender Studies,
Postcolonial Studies and Aging Studies have a common
background and come to a shared conclusion: la femme n'existe
pas, le nègre n'existe pas, la vieillesse n'existe pas.
Conclusion with regard to current debates
The existentialist discourse on others develops a critique of
ageism which is unsurpassed even today in the field of
gerontology. This is because its critique is geared first and
foremost not towards psychological or psychiatric aspects of
age discrimination and age exclusion but towards the funda-
mental coding of the gaze in western cultures and societies.
What Sartre, de Beauvoir, Fanon and Améry all recognized was
that racism, sexism and ageism are based on the same
essentialist regulating principle of the gaze: the “great
Manichaeistic division of the world” (Sartre, [1948] 1964/65:
21) into black and white, female and male, old and not-old.
Thus it is ultimately a deterministic binarism that leads to
individuals and groups – and indeed entire cultures and
cultural regions (as in ‘the West and the rest’) – being despised,
excluded, regarded as an unsettling and threatening Other and
condemned to subalternity (othering, alienation).
This fundamental critique is highly topical not only in terms
of its lasting influence on Postcolonial Studies and Gender
Studies but also due to the fact that it helps to establish the
theoretical – not least epistemological – foundations of Aging
Studies. One of the lessons to be drawn from Améry and de
Beauvoir is that research on aging needs to subject its own gaze
(basic distinctions, axiological premises, normative impacts
and normalizing consequences) to critique. How else, they
argue, can research itself avoid inadvertently reducing older
people's options to nothing other than a specific set of criteria,
requirements and ways of living?
This problem can be illustrated by looking at the example of
positive views of old age, and especially at notions of active,
productive and successful aging. It bears asking, as Améry and
de Beauvoir suggest, whether the basic problem of determin-
istic binarism is actually overcome by such notions. Does the
problem not actually crop up in a more subtle form here? Has
the epistemological step already been taken that shifted
feminism in the direction of Gender Studies — namely, the
attempt to overcome essentialist divisions between people
(Butler, 1993)? Skepticism is still called for when phrases such
as “the positive opportunities of old age” are mentioned: Do
such phrases not actually reflect a set of mid-life and middle
93
class norms that are merely being peddled as a desirable
outlook for old age? This is suggested not least by the fact that
the prevailing vocabulary used is clearly based on the standards
of western economies: activity, productivity, and success as
fundamental criteria. Prior to poststructuralist discourse there
had been no more profound critique in this sense than that of
Améry and de Beauvoir, who likewise encouraged consider-
ation of the socio-economic implications of gerontology and its
regulatory impacts (biopolitics, governmentality, normalization).
Like any other academic subsystem, gerontology is itself
based on a key distinction through which it is constituted and
legitimated: without the basic distinction between old and not
old there would be no research dedicated to old age. Améry and
de Beauvoir caution us, however, not to conceive of this key
distinction in a deterministic and essentialist way or to apply it
as such, but rather to use it self-reflexively and self-critically.
The premises of gerontology and the standards and require-
ments to which they give rise must be subjected regularly to
questioning critique. Otherwise even approaches that are
intended as positive and encouraging (even those of a
differential gerontology) can themselves lead to aging people
being judged according to the norms of physique and vitality of
a younger, western, white middle class.
So-called “happy gerontology” (Bobbio, 2006; translation:
van Dyk, 2014: 93) needs to be met with a critical and skeptical
gerontology. Such a gerontology could overcome deterministic
binarism by means of a paradoxical move to transcend its own
points of reference: while the key distinction old/not old would
remain the epistemic foundation of Aging Studies, it would
simultaneously be placed in a state of permanent suspension
and held there self-critically. This would amount, paradoxically,
to gerontology transcending itself by fundamentally reframing
the very issue that is its main idea, namely, old age. By
destabilizing its fundamental premise, Aging Studies may be
able to open up “a wide range of possibilities” to those who are
growing old (de Beauvoir, [1970] 1996: 543). Only once the
fixation on old age has been overcome can the issue central to
differential gerontology become available for scholarly consid-
eration: difference — understood now in the strong sense of
alterity, of opportunities and spaces for aging differently
(Zimmermann, 2015: 230).
This involves, first, speaking about old age in terms of its
otherness (otherness, alterity, hybridity). However, even these
options need to be reconsidered from a critical point of view –
not least because postcolonial discourse teaches us that it is
precisely those academics who wish to give others a voice who
should be asking themselves whether or not they are doing this
from an asymmetric, paternalistic position that serves merely
to patronize others. To put this in the words of Lévinas and
Spivak: it is important to develop responsible structures in
Aging Studies which acknowledge the Other in his/her alterity
and not, for example, to bind them to certain norms and
demands using labels such as responsibility and shared
responsibility.
Aging Studies researchers are interested in the voice – or
rather, voices – of old age, as they can be heard, for example, in
actor-centered micro-studies (Cole et al., 1993; Gubrium, 1993;
Baars et al., 2006: 4/5). But critical gerontologists should avoid
seeing themselves all too hastily as “spokespersons of
subalternity” (Spivak, 1993: 292). When individual academics
acquire a skeptical view of what they are doing, their gaze will
94 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
become more probing and less self-confident: “He [she] never
sees very clearly where he [she] is going; he [she] is ‘open’”.
Responsible gerontologists act as if their own premises “were in
continual suspension” (Sartre, [1944] 1995: 12). This applies
even to the issue of speaking itself. Is the fixation on language
and consciousness not itself an epistemic premise (and a
‘western’ one, at that)? From a phenomenological point of
view, both Camus and Fanon refer to sounds, signs, gestures,
movements, habitus and rituals as possibilities for living
alterity and giving it expression.
Can the old speak? — Yes and no, in a hybrid manner, more
or less, depending on the actor, the situation, locality and
context, and depending on class, race and gender (Bhabha,
1994). It sometimes seems absurd to insist upon being
“something” in opposition to the socio-cultural “annihilation
of the aging human being” (Améry, [1968] 1994: 68, 77). Are
there ways of aging differently? To pose this question is to take
upon oneself a Sisyphean task. This is the case not only for
every single aging person who takes care of themselves but also
for every single academic in terms of their responsibility for the
people they are studying. Perhaps the following can be said of
us all: “I rebel — therefore we exist” (Camus, [1951] 1992: 22).
References
Althusser, L. (1971). Ideology and ideological state apparatuses. Lenin and
philosophy, and other essays. London: New Left Books.
Améry, J. (1968). On aging. Revolt and resignation. Bloomington and Indianpolis:
Indiana University Press.
Arendt, H. (1951). The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books.
Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G., & Tiffin, H. (Eds.). (2006). The post-colonial studies
reader (2nd ed.). London, New York: Routledge.
Baars, J., Dannefer, D., Phillipson, C., & Walker, A. (2006). Introduction: Critical
perspectives in social gerontology. In J. Baars, D. Dannefer, C. Phillipson, & A.
Walker (Eds.), Aging, globalization, and inequality. The new critical
gerontology (pp. 1–14) (Amityville, New York: Baywood).
Bhabha, H. (1994). The location of culture. London, New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (1986). Foreword: Remembering Fanon. self, psyche and the
colonial condition. In F. Fanon (Ed.), Black skin, white masks (pp. vii–xxv).
London: Pluto Press.
Bhabha, H. (1988). Cultural diversity and cultural differences. In B. Ashcroft, G.
Griffiths, & H. Tiffin (Eds.), The post-colonial studies reader (pp. 155–157)
(2nd ed.). London, New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, H. (2012). Über kulturelle Hybridität. Tradition und Übersetzung [On
cultural hybridity. Tradition and translation]. Wien, Berlin: Turia & Kant.
Biggs, S. (2004). New ageism: Age imperialism, personal experience and ageing
policy. In S. Daatland, & S. Biggs (Eds.), Ageing and diversity (pp. 95–106).
Bristol: Polity Press.
Bobbio, N. (2006). Vom Alter – De Senectute [On Old Age]. Berlin: Wagenbach.
Brinkmann, M. (2008). Leiblichkeit und Verantwortung – phänomenologische
Analysen zur Alternserfahrung und zur Ethik des Alter(n)s [Bodiliness and
responsibility. Phenomenological analyses on the experience of ageing and
on the ethics of age(ing)]. In D. Ferring, M. Haller, & H. Meyer-Wolters
(Eds.), Soziokulturelle Konstruktion des Alters. Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven
(pp. 233–256)Socio-cultural construction of age. Transdisciplinary perspec-
tives (pp. 233–256). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann.
Butler, R. N. (1969). Age-ism: Another form of bigotry. Gerontologist, 9(4),
243–246.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex“. New York:
Routledge.
Camus, A. (1951). The rebel. An essay on man in revolt. New York: Vintage.
Camus, A. (1942). The myth of Sisyphus. New York: Penguin.
Cole, T., Achenbaum, W. A., Jakobi, P., & Kastenbaum, R. (Eds.). (1993). Voices
and visions of aging: Toward a critical gerontology. New York: Springer.
Coupland, N., & Coupland, J. (1993). Discourses of ageism and anti-ageism.
Journal of Aging Studies, 7(3), 279–301.
de Beauvoir, S. (1970). The coming of age. New York, London: W. W. Norton, &
Company.
de Beauvoir, S. (1949). The second sex. London: Vintage.
Derrida, J. (1982). Of an apocalyptic tone recently adopted in philosophy.
Semeia, 23, 63–97.
Derrida, J. (1967). Of grammatology [Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak]
(Corrected ed.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Fanon, F. (1966). Toward the African revolution (New ed.). New York: Grove Press.
Fanon, F. (1961). The Wretched of the Earth. Preface by Jean-Paul Sartre. London:
Penguin.
Fanon, F. (1952). Black skin, white masks. London: Pluto Press.
Foucault, M. (1986). The history of sexuality. Vol. III: The care of the self. New York:
Pantheon Books.
Foucault, M. (2008). The government of self and others: Lectures at the Collège de
France 1982–1983. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2010). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France
1978–1979. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freud, S. (1895). The Psychotherapy of Hysteria. In S. Freud (Ed.), The standard
edition of the complete psychological works. Vol. 2 (1893–1895): Studies on
hysteria. London: The Hogarth Press (pp. 353–306).
Freud, S. (1900). The interpretation of dreams. New York: Basic Books.
Gubrium, J. F. (1993). Voice and context in a new gerontology. In T. Cole, W. A.
Achenbaum, P. Jakobi, & R. Kastenbaum (Eds.), Voices and visions of aging:
Toward a critical gerontology (pp. 46–63). New York: Springer.
Hall, S. (1991). Ethnicity: Identity and difference. Radical America, 23(4), 9–20.
Hall, S. (1992a). The west and the rest: Discourse of power. In S. Hall, & B.
Gieben (Eds.), Formations of modernity (pp. 275–320). Cambridge, Oxford:
Polity Press.
Hall, S. (1992b). The question of cultural identity. In S. Hall, D. Held, & T.
McGrew (Eds.), Modernity and its futures (pp. 273–316). Cambridge,
Oxford: Polity Press.
Hall, S. (1996). The afterlife of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why now? Why black
skin, white masks? In A. Read (Ed.), The fact of blackness: Frantz Fanon and
visual representation (pp. 26–31). London, Seattle: Bay Press.
Hatch, L. (2005). Gender and ageism. Generations, 29(3), 19–24.
Hazan, H. (1994). Old age: Construction and deconstruction. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Hazan, H. (2009). Essential others: Anthropology and the return of the old
savage. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 29(1–2), 60–72.
Holstein, M. B., & Minkler, M. (2003). Self, society and the ‘new gerontology’.
The Gerontologist, 43, 787–796.
Horkheimer, M., & Adorno, T. W. (1947). Dialectic of enlightenment. Philosophical
fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Katz, S. (2014). What is age studies? Age Culture Humanities, 1, 1–7 (online:
http://ageculturehumanities.org).
Klie, T. (2014). Wen kümmern die Alten? Auf dem Weg in eine sorgende
Gesellschaft [Who cares about the elderly? On the way to a caring society].
München: Pattloch.
Kruse, A. (2014). Entwicklungspotenziale und Verletzlichkeit im hohen und
sehr hohen Alter [Development potentials and vulnerability in old and
oldest age]. Psychotherapie im Alter, 11(2), 177–198.
Lacan, J. (1973). Television: A challenge to the psychoanalytic establishment. New
York: Norton.
Lévinas, E. (2000). Entre Nous. On thinking-of-the-other [1951–1989]. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Palmore, E. (1990). Ageism, negative and positive. New York: Springer.
Philippson, C. (1998). Reconstructing old age: New agendas in social theory and
practice. London: Sage.
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism. New York: Random Books.
Said, E. W. (1993). Culture and imperialism. New York: Vintage Books.
Sartre, J. -P. ([1948] 1964/65). Black Orpheus. The Massachusetts Review, 6(1),
13–52.
Sartre, J. -P. (1973). Über Geschlossene Gesellschaft [On No Exit]. In J. -P. Sartre
(Ed.), Geschlossene Gesellschaft [No exit] (pp. 60–63). Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt.
Sartre, J. -P. (1943). Being and nothingness. A phenomenological essay on
ontology. London: Washington Square Press.
Sartre, J. -P. (1944). Anti-Semite and Jew: An exploration of the etiology of hate.
New York: Schocken.
Sartre, J. -P. (1946). Existentialism is a humanism. New Haven, & London: Yale
University Press.
Sartre, J. -P. (1944). No exit. A play in one act. London: Samuel French.
Sontag, S. (1972). The double standard of aging. Saturday Review of the Society,
23, 29–38.
Spivak, G. C. (1988a). Can the subaltern speak? In C. Nelson, & L. Grossberg
(Eds.), Marxism and the interpretation of culture (pp. 271–313). Chicago:
University of Illinois Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1988b). Subalterns studies. Deconstructing historiographie. In R.
Guha, & G. C. Spivak (Eds.), Selected subaltern studies (pp. 3–32). New York:
Oxford University Press.
Spivak, G. C. (1993). Subaltern talk. Interview with the editors. In D. Landry, & G.
MacLean (Eds.), The Spivak reader. Selected works of Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (pp. 287–308). London: Routledge.
Spivak, G. C. (1999). A critique of postcolonial reason. Toward a history of
vanishing present. Cambridge, London: Havard University Press.
 H.-P. Zimmermann / Journal of Aging Studies 39 (2016) 83–95
Todd, N. (Ed.). (2002). Agism, stereotyping and prejudice against older persons.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Turner, B. (1995). Aging and identity: Some reflections of the somatization of
the self. In M. Featherstone, & A. Wernick (Eds.), Images of aging
(pp. 245–262). London: Routledge.
Van Dyk, S. (2014). The appraisal of difference. Critical gerontology and the
active-ageing-paradigm. Journal of Aging Studies, 31, 93–103.
van Dyk, S., & Küpper, T. (2014). Theorizing age — Insights from postcolonial
studies. In European Network in Aging Studies (ENAS). 8th International
Conference on Cultural Gerontology (pp. 10–12). Galway: National
95
University of Ireland (April 2014. Available on: http://www.conference.ie/
content/FINAL%20Conference%20Schedule%202nd%20April.pdf (Accessed
May 31st, 2016)).
Zimmermann, H. -P. (2015). Anders Altern. Transdisziplinäre Perspektiven
[Aging differently. Transdisciplinary perspectives]. Zeitschrift für
Gerontologie und Geriatrie, 48(3), 225–230.
Zimmermann, H. -P., & Grebe, H. (2014). “Senior coolness”: Living well as an
attitude in later life. Journal of Aging Studies, 28, 22–34.