The meaning and value of quality of life has eluded researchers and philosophers for centuries. In this book I take the reader through a textual journey, so that it may be approached differently. Qualitative research chapters are alternated with those analysing the political and cultural background to their making. These texts are then woven into a deconstruction of quality of life in the five oppositional pairs of life and death, health and illness, independence and dependence, empowerment and disempowerment and certainty and uncertainty. This deconstructive thread informs and is...