ER (...) Ellipses

This article explores matters of health and illness through a consideration of questions of temporality. Approaching health as a liminal stage and as a practice of freedom and potentiality, the seesaw between well-being and disease, or the thresholds between life and death, are considered in the light of the figures of turns and returns. Questions of exception, emergency, and suspension of the law are addressed by evocation of the concepts of medical diagnosis and prognosis. The poetics of illness and malaise are explored through the temporal allegory of the eternal recurrence of the same: as moments and movements of ellipses. Writing itself is considered here as a series of turns and returns around the (im)possible inscription of memory: as a toxic yet healing supplement.