It was not so long ago that the rhetoric of a global end to AIDS as thinkable and achievable became dominant in the media and global public health circles. US President Donald Trump’s recent withdrawal of funding from the President’s Emergency Fund for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has, however, once more raised the spectre of tens of thousands more new HIV infections and thousands of additional preventable AIDS deaths in South Africa. This lecture focuses on the early 2000s and brings together works of art exhibited at the Durban Art Gallery and South African fiction such as Damon Galgut’s The Promise (considered ethnography) to examine notions of “an end” in three methodological senses: firstly, to explore the ethical and political dilemmas (and desirable “ends”) for historians when they adopt means to examine earlier periods of mass death of people with spoiled identities. Secondly, it explores the expansive possibilities and limitations of simultaneously interpreting sources multimodally, that is, with different creative modes of representation (visual and literary) to understand extreme emotions; namely, abjection both in people shown and described as living with AIDS in the absence of HIV treatment (an end of meaning) and the way in which audiences must grapple with the potential trauma of reckoning with very high rates of suffering where the extremity of the factual seems to border on the surreal (and, even, imaginary). In this sense, it argues that final perfection is improbable both in terms of conquering the epidemic itself (for the foreseeable future) and in terms of obtaining emotional, moral and intellectual finality when it comes to interpreting it as scholars.