Terminality

This article is an attempt, through a personal encounter with terminal cancer, to elaborate some of what terminality consists in, compared with other similar concepts, such as living in prognosis, dying, or suspension. The terminal body is a body from which promise, hope, and potential have been withdrawn. Linking it in part to the secular elimination of the afterlife and the confinement of person to a finite body whose time is limited entirely to itself, such that time and body become coterminous, the author argues that terminality changes the embodiment of time in a specific way: feeling temporality as a countdown in hours, days, or months, terminality is experienced as a body ticking with the sound of its own end.