In Search of the Good Old Life: Ontological Breakdown and Responsive Hope at the Margins of Life

What might the good life amount to at the margins of life? Taking our point of departure in Jonathan Lear’s notions of ontological breakdown and radical hope as well as the phenomenology of lived time, we explore hope within the institutional aging process in Denmark. Drawing on two ethnographic cases, Vagn and Thea, we propose a phenomenological and responsive hope emerging within complex temporalities. This is a relational hope to be included among the living, to be a human being among others. Importantly, it is neither optimistic nor naive but rather hope practiced in the face of devastating life circumstances.