Description
Many phenomenological analyses of chronic illness have pointed out how suffering from a chronic illness can change a person’s embodied sense of time and obstruct one’s openness towards the future. This paper aims to contribute to these analyses by examining how the person’s experience of chronicity might be intertwined with what we could consider as the historical-institutional production of ‘the chronic’. By this I mean, for instance, the history of chronic hospitalization, as well as how medical professionals communicated and still communicate about chronic illness; chronicity is often framed as a never-ending, never-changing condition without hope for improvement in contemporary medical discourse. To open up discussions on how the socio-historical meaning of the chronic influences and perhaps co-constitutes chronic suffering, I will draw on the work of the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth Plessner, who stated that human personhood is characterized by a three-fold structure: I am by body qua Leib, I have my body as a thing or Körper, and as a person I must constantly take a new position in the world by actualizing a relation between having and being a body. My paper will focus especially on the notion of Mitwelt in Plessner’s work. This historical and culturally shared world, so I will argue, is a prerequisite for any position the person takes in the world to make sense in the first place, implying that socio-historical meanings have a profound influence one’s embodied being-in-the-world. On the basis of this idea, I will examine how the medical diagnosis of a chronic disease and the social stigma surrounding ‘the chronic’ could inscribe itself into the embodied experience of the person and contribute to a chronic illness being experienced as fundamentally chaotic, hopeless and unshareable with others.| Period | 17 Jun 2024 |
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| Event title | NoSP 2024 conference: Between Past and Future: Existence, Embodiment, and Historicity |
| Event type | Conference |
| Conference number | 21 |
| Location | Trondheim, NorwayShow on map |
Keywords
- phenomenology
- history
- philosophical anthropology
- chronic illness