Never Too Late for Pleasure: Aging, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Potentiality in Denmark

TY - JOUR

T1 - Never Too Late for Pleasure

T2 - Aging, Neoliberalism and the Politics of Potentiality in Denmark

AU - Mikkelsen, Henrik Hvenegaard

PY - 2017/11

Y1 - 2017/11

N2 - Health promotion in the Danish welfare state increasingly consists of helping people to identify and realize their inner potential for health and happiness. Such a “politics of potentiality” might seem to reflect the widespread neoliberal economic deregulation and austerity policies that have in recent decades marked public health sectors throughout the industrialized world. But in the encounter between the Danish state and its aging citizens, all moral demands converge on the imperative of identifying how citizens may become subjects who live up to certain definitions of what constitutes pleasure and selfrealization. This represents an instantiation of neoliberal health promotion that targets the sense of loss that people associate with their unactualized potentials—their unlived lives.

AB - Health promotion in the Danish welfare state increasingly consists of helping people to identify and realize their inner potential for health and happiness. Such a “politics of potentiality” might seem to reflect the widespread neoliberal economic deregulation and austerity policies that have in recent decades marked public health sectors throughout the industrialized world. But in the encounter between the Danish state and its aging citizens, all moral demands converge on the imperative of identifying how citizens may become subjects who live up to certain definitions of what constitutes pleasure and selfrealization. This represents an instantiation of neoliberal health promotion that targets the sense of loss that people associate with their unactualized potentials—their unlived lives.

M3 - Tidsskriftartikel

SN - 0094-0496

VL - 44

SP - 646

EP - 656

JO - American Ethnologist

JF - American Ethnologist

IS - 4

ER -