Presents in dementia: groundless temporalities and ethics in a Danish dementia ward

This article explores temporal and ethical presents in a dementia ward in Denmark. Dementia wards are often portrayed and experienced as uncanny places where time stands still or becomes radically distorted. I approach the ward, however, as an encounter or access into experiences of time that are hidden from view in the outside world where common‐sense conceptions of time (such as clock time, weekdays, months, and years) have a stronger and more persuasive hold on us. With a point of departure in the notions of the ‘ethnographic epoché’ and ‘anarchaeological reduction’, I build on recent developments within critical phenomenology and world philosophies taking my theoretical inspiration from Indian and Tibetan Madhyamaka traditions. I explore multiple temporal appearances at the ward: institutional time; intersubjective, potentially frictional time; resonant time; still time; and ritual‐event time, appearances that are ever‐emerging, blending, and dissolving. In the vocabulary of Madhyamaka philosophy, they appear but are empty, they are empty but appear. Finally, I discuss the ethical implications of a groundless ontology of time for a contemporary Danish ageing landscape characterized by ideals of healthy and active ageing, and propose an ethics of groundless temporal generosity.