Opening up the Debate on the Aging Society: Preliminary Hypotheses for a Possible Mutational and Post-mutationary Society (International Perspectives on Aging, 34)

This book documents, verifies and brings to life the issues and debates that are created around the aging society. It carefully offers a series of opinions that attempt to illuminate the fact that the aging society goes beyond aging and includes a series of changes in terms of family, social ties, relationships, and the way human beings perceive society. The book contributes substantially to the discussion of this new type of aging, the new types of families, and the new types of relationships, as well as in the application of cutting-edge analytical strategies to understand the trends and patterns of these new modes of social structures. The book includes detailed perspectives on how decisions need to be made, mindsets need to be changed, and precautions need to be taken to positively deal with these new realities. The evidence presented in this book suggests that if this does not happen, the danger of thanato-politics appears, which, denying reality, will lead humanity into difficult labyrinths, perhaps without any "Ariadne's thread" that will allow a glimpse of the way out. The translation from Spanish to English was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content. Prologue Contents Chapter 1: Note About the Methodological and Conceptual Use of This Book Chapter 2: Old Age No Longer Anticipates the Unpostponable Sign of Death: The New Social and Identity Models of Older Adults 2.1 Quantitative Data: The Ageing Society 2.2 Extrapolations to Ageing Society Data 2.3 Qualitative Data: The Profound Social and Identity Experimentation of Older Adults 2.4 Alberto’s Case: The Beginning of Subjective Experimentation 2.5 Nelson’s Case: Change Is Possible 2.6 Joseph’s Case: The Frank Subjective Experimentation 2.7 Analysis of the Life History Fragments of Alberto, Nelson and Joseph 2.8 The Appropriation of the Social Promise and the Future as a Structure for the Constitution of the Subjectivity of the Older Adult 2.9 The Political Power of Older Adults 2.10 The Breakaway Group of Older Adults 2.11 From Emergent Subjectivities to Abrupt Subjectivities 2.12 Conclusion Chapter 3: The New Dialogues of Grandparenthood from the Social Precariousness and Family Bewilderment 3.1 What Is Required of Parental Figures 3.2 Bewildered Parents 3.3 Today’s Family Emerging from Unprecedented Social Change 3.4 The (Lost) Meaning of Parenting Today 3.5 The So-Called Demographic Transition 3.6 The Protagonism of the Dialogues of Grandparenthood 3.7 Conclusion Chapter 4: The Older Adult, the Social Bond in Transition and the Depletion of the Transmission Capacity 4.1 Previous Considerations on the Traditional Social Bond 4.2 Social Bond: The Ever-Renewable and Present 4.2.1 The Agony of the Social Bond 4.3 The Profound Resignification of Old People and the Renewal of the Social Bond 4.4 Reconstruction of the Figure of the Ancestor from Grandparenthood 4.5 The Generational Confrontation of Old People. Exhaustion of the Traditional Transmission of the Social Bond 4.6 The Scenes of Disrepute 4.7 Conclusion Chapter 5: Change to the “Social Order” from the Deconstruction Imposed by the Ageing Society: Social Relations That Become Anachronistic, Social Relations That Are Idealized, Social Relations That Are Denigrated 5.1 Social Relations That Are Decisively Reconfigured 5.2 The Emphasis on the Capacity for Generational-Transgenerational Confrontation 5.3 The Performativity of Generating Change Brought About by Older Adults 5.4 Anachronistic Social Relations: The Impossibility of Transmitting and the Discredit of Inheritance 5.5 The Instituting-Instituted Dimension of the Social Contract 5.6 The Excess of the Machinic Institute 5.7 The Support of a Rebellious Institutionally Active 5.8 Conclusion Chapter 6: Ageism, Disability and Healthy Ageing as Stereotypizing Paradigms 6.1 Ageism: Fear of Ageing? Fear of Old People? Fear of What? 6.2 History, Theory and Criticism 6.3 The Proliferation of Old People and Old Age 6.4 On Helplessness as a Stereotypical Paradigm 6.5 Ageism from the Paradigm of Healthy Ageing 6.6 The Disastrous Experience of Covid-19: Exacerbation and Justification of Ageism 6.7 Understanding the Resurgence of Ageism 6.8 Ageism: A Surprising Force of Influence 6.9 Conclusion Chapter 7: Old People, Coronavirus and the Precarious Culture of Precariousness 7.1 The Principle 7.2 The Coronavirus Discourse as a Renewal of the Hygienist Discourse 7.3 The Precariousness of Precariousness 7.4 The Taxing Temptation of Hard References 7.5 Psychosocial Consequences of the High Subjective, Bonding and Cultural Experience of Older People 7.6 And Suddenly the COVID-19 7.7 The Precarious Precariousness of Today’s World 7.8 Conclusion Chapter 8: Thanatopolitics, Totalitarianism and Coronavirus: A Tour of Excesses 8.1 The Renewed Version of the Black Plague 8.2 Disciplines, Viruses and Health Discourse 8.3 Health Discourse and Viruses Everywhere 8.4 What We Are Talking About When It Comes to totalitarianism. The Obedient-Subject 8.5 Cancerous Logic of the Show 8.6 The Oppressive Power, the Gratifying Power, the Annihilating Power 8.7 Thanatopolitical Precariousness 8.8 How Does All This Continue? 8.9 Conclusion Chapter 9: Insoluble Dilemmas of a Bewildered World 9.1 A Social Model That Is Paradoxically Very Unsocial 9.2 Insolvable Dilemmas? The Exhausted Social Contract 9.3 The Structure of Bewildered Adults 9.4 The Mutational Society 9.5 Subjective Implications of the Mutational Society 9.6 Conclusion Chapter 10: Preliminary Hypotheses for a Probability Called Mutational Society Chapter 11: Unstable Reasons of a Possible Post-Mutational Society Bibliography Index