ABSTRACT
We may or may not choose to act our age-we may be immature or precocious —but the momentum of our biological chronology seems, self-evidently, to override the more fluid, reversible identifications of postmodem subjectivity. Age is a component of identity which fixes us within a register of absolute universal terms, setting out the limits of what it means to be human. Punctuated by life stages and the rhythms of a finite bodily existence, personal histories are welded firmly to the grand narratives of History (with a capital H) by the concept of age. And just as significant events (wars, legislation, discoveries) seem to stand as immovable points of reference in the past of a particular culture, so each individual history is also bounded by the absolutes of significant bodily events: birth, puberty, childbearing, menopause, death. The fragments of a corpse can usually tell us, if nothing else, the sex and age of the person who has died, as well as the approximate date of their death.1
