The Ontology of Maturity in the Face of the Imperative of Evanescence

Abstract

This chapter deals with the issue of a subject’s maturation in the perspective of evanescence, which is that subject’s boundary experience. The main issue of this text is time as a Lacanian symptom of a sense of existential meaning, generating the need for individual coping strategies around ageing. Ontological and epistemological dimensions of this text are based on interpretative tools derived from Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Maturity in the interpretative layer was embedded in Heidegger’s understanding of the ontological “non-deductive construction of the genealogy of various possible types of being” (Heidegger 1994: 16). Problematization of the issue of subjective maturity in aspect of reflection about transience, time and subjective evolution pose questions regarding hermeneutical and discursive sources of symptom starting up boundary experience subject. The interpretative perspective is guided by the assumption that the greatest cultural transformation can be found in the enforcement of certain social practices, which boil the action down to the structure of specific assumptions, goals and effects.

Contemporary thinking about seniors has been pressurized to undergo changes which appear to be tainted by a conscious revolution at the axiological level being ousted by pragmatics and usefulness of an agent, who is reduced to a tool generating potential social profit. On its interpretative layer, a text is constructed on the basis of Jacques Lacan's discourse and refers to such aspects as: dialectics of language, optics of vision, the primacy of the significant over an agent, and an agent as a “cultural artifact”.