NotNormativelyHuman 255
And Margaret Gullette, whose Agewise (2011) presents many
compelling examples of the hauntology of "age" in U.S.-American
cultureespeciallyandreportsonincidentswhereyoungpeoplesaythey
would rather kill themselves than go through the experience of
becomingold:
People see ahead of them, in grim shadowy forms, the prospective life-
course narrative that the dominant culture provides—an unlivable mind
and unrecognizable body... death—at least imagined way in advance,
by healthy young people, as vaguely, somehow a choice—can seem
preferabletoaging-into-old-age.(24)What such reflections indicate is that the haunting fear of "age" acts
culturally not only in temporal but also spatial terms, namely asa
generatorofdistance, distance to oneself (in another but closely related
version of the Lacanian mirror stage)^85 but also to "aging" or "aged"
people as ominously Other. My earlier argument about norms as
roadmaps which locate normative as well as non-normative human life
indesignatedareasisquitetothepointhere.
Another idea, introduced above, namely that "age" is not a property
of an individual but a social and cultural relation, also takes us to the
spatialityoflatelife—tothelocationsandpositionsinwhichthevarious
aspects of elder life take "their" place and where they can be observed
for analytic purposes. In this chapter, I therefore want to discuss the
multiple ways in which the imaginary grammar of "age" norms situates
human(rarelyanimal)bodiesnotonlyintimebutalsoinspace.Whileit
seems immediately plausible that the category "age" constructs specific
temporal relations, the fact that it also fashions spatial relations, even
determinate ones, warrants an explanation. True, people speaking of
elder life have often used spatial terminology, such as Virginia Woolf
did when she reflected on her own getting old: "So the land recedes
frommyshipwhichdrawsoutintotheseaofoldage.Thelandwithits
children" (Diary283). Or Simone de Beauvoir, lamenting the loss of
(^85) ForanelaborateargumentontheLacanianmirrorstageanditsrelevancefora
cultural critique of "age," see Woodward,AgingandItsDiscontents53-72; see
alsoSegal25,110-11,125.