ABSTRACT
As I write this paper, Dr Deepak Chopra’s Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old (1993) is the hottest selling commodity in advice literature (Globe and Mail, Toronto, 17 August 1993). Blending bits of historical wisdom on keeping old age at bay with postmodern self-discipline on keeping the body ‘ageless’, this book, like so many published today on living the long life, appeals to our cultural preoccupation with challenging the limits of the human life-span. The human life-span, whatever duration it assumes, is a peculiar kind of fact because it represents a possibility that is rarely achieved. Unlike life expectancy, which is a statistical figure based on the average person’s length of life, the life-span is ‘the extreme limit of human longevity’, that is, the longevity of the longest living individuals (Gruman, 1966: 7). Hence, the life-span embodies the boundaries of human existence, and, in our culture, these boundaries are set by the scientific community at 110 years. However, if one considers the life-span to be more than an indisputable biological fact, and examines it as a discursive or imagined production, symbolic of a culture’s beliefs about living and aging, then one can also glimpse something of the larger social and ideological orders from which such beliefs derive their significance. In other words, the life-span provides an intellectual key to how general discourses of existence are organized, whether such discourses are conceived in biological, philosophical, political, theological or consumerist terms.
