Closing the book of life: The hospice discourse and the construction of the dying role: A discourse-theoretical analysis

Abstract

Death and dying are surrounded by a wealth of discourses that provide people with sense-making and coping mechanisms to deal with death and bereavement. One of the discourses that has achieved dominance in doing precisely this, is the hospice discourse. This chapter uses the poststructuralist discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) (and beyond) as the backbone for the study of the hospice discourse as a mechanism allowing people to cope with the end of life by providing them with a ‘dying script’ within which to deal with the emotionality of imminent death. More precisely, we use discourse theory to look into the way the hospice discourse privileges certain ways of enacting emotions in the face of death, thereby prescribing a dying role in which the dying individual is subtly manoeuvred through expressivist and therapeutic moments allowing her or him to, eventually, accept the imminent death.