The inherent humanity of old age: a critique of ‘post-humanist’ gerontology

Abstract Against the calls for the development of ‘a more than human’ gerontology, this article challenges the assumptions behind this move by positing that its dependence on post-humanist epistemologies and ontologies risks making age a matter more of the imagination than of human mattering, of assemblage more than of meaning. The ‘decentring’ involved in such approaches of what is distinctly human about ageing has led to an imaginary ontology of flattened ‘assemblages’ of age. While these post-humanist developments might seem to offer an imaginative leap into a ‘more than human’ world, the radicalism implied can equally be understood as being largely rhetorical, designed to impress rather than inform our thinking. If the distinctly human experience of age and finitude is absented from our thinking, the mattering of ageing risks being reduced to no more than the universal flux of an impersonal vitalism. We would conclude that it is still critically important for gerontology to maintain its privileging of the human and more generally of humanism in thinking about and researching the tasks it sets itself.