Prologue: The Dying Body as Lived Experience
Introduction: Death, Mystery, Life
1. Desperation as Grey Zone
2. Fear and Trembling
3. The Collective Fantasizes Death: The Imaginary at the End of its Tether
4. Fear and Likely Stories
5. Death, Happiness and the Meaning of Life: The View from Sociology
6. Ending and Beginning
Part 2: Dementia and the Look of Madness: Aging, Raging and the Poetics of Passing On
7. The Enigma of the Brain and its Place as Cause, Character, and Pretext in the Imaginary of Dementia
8. The Writing Machine: Public Health, Dementia and the Spell of the Brain as an Object of Social Enthusiasm
9. Plague Strikes the Family
10. The Cliche of Depression
11. Tragedy and Comedy
12. The Travesty of End of Life
Biography
Alan Blum is Executive Director of the Culture of Cities Centre and Senior Professor of Sociology and Communication and Culture at York University, Canada. He is the author of The Grey Zone of Health and Illness, Theorizing, and The Imaginative Structure of the City, and co-author of On the Beginning of Social Inquiry and Self-Reflection in the Arts and Sciences.
'The Dying Body as a Lived Experience tackles all the weighty questions of existence in an unflinching fashion, comfortably occupying the same philosophical spaces of Plato, the founder of philosophy; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, German philosopher in the early modern era; Martin Heidegger, mid 20th-century German philosopher; and French Sociologist Émile Durkheim, most often cited as the principal architect of modern social science. What’s striking to the reader and perhaps Blum’s greatest contribution is his comprehensive, all-encompassing approach to this vast subject not through white-hot issues of organ donation or the death penalty, but instead through everyday life experiences such as loneliness, demoralization, desperation, settings of rehabilitation and propensities for acting-out on occasion.'
Megan Mueller, Research Communications, York University, 2017
