agonal

comparative more agonal · superlative most agonal

1. Of or pertaining to struggle, competition or conflict; of or pertaining to an agon.

   Even the agonal games which began with the ancient Greeks were playful in their singular devotion to deities. Games were agonal demonstrations of transcendence.

   1994, Edward Kuhlman, Agony in Education: The Importance of Struggle in the Process of Learning, Bergin & Garvey, page 70

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   The agonal spirit was strong enough to inspire 'shame' at a failure to fight when the enemy offered battle, but not so strong that it made armies accept battle under any circumstances.

   2004, Hans van Wees, Greek Warfare: Myth and Realities, Bloomsbury Academic, page 135

   It is because the very basis of their world view, emerging from the deepest recesses of their psyches where their most basic identities were formed from birth – long before they experienced the agonal reality of class – affectively consolidated in the emotional hothouses of their families, is sexuality.

   2006, Stan Goff, Sex & War, Soft Skull Press, page 175

2. Of or pertaining to the pain of death.

   The agonal effects associated with prolonged illness may influence the pH, and subsequently a number of chemical substances in the brain.

   2003, Dick F. Swaab, Human Hypothalamus: Basic and Clinical Aspects, Part I, Elsevier, page 23

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   The similarity of these persistent invaginations to the agonal is quite marked; like the agonal, they are multiple, rather short, they are in the ileum, and they are ascending, which is not at all an uncommon feature of the invaginations of death. Agonal invaginations in the adult are, however, uncommon and seldom found; but, in spite of this fact, the suggestion is near at hand that perhaps the multiple, healed invaginations here described are, as it were, persistent agonal formations, the death-struggle implied terminating in favor of the patient.

   1894, Ludvig Hektoen, “A Specimen of Four Healed, Ascending, Ileal Invaginations, Symmetrical and Equidistant”, in Judson Daland, Joseph Price Tunis, Boardman Reed, Walter Lytle Pyle, editors, International Medical Magazine, Volume 2, page 1010

   In contrast, severe infections are characterized by the development of hypoglycemia during the agonal stages of the disease process as a result of an impaired capacity of the liver to synthesize glucose (LaNoue et al., 1968b; Yeung, 1970; McCallum and Berry, 1973).

   1981, Michael C. Powanda, Peter G. Canonico, Infection: the Physiologic and Metabolic Responses of the Host, Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press, page 117