5th Global Conference
Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers
Session 7: Aspects of Suicide
Chair: Christian Riegel
Intentional Death: Stoicism and the Debate on Suicide
Petra
Benske
Philosophy Department,
NUI, Galway,
Republic of Ireland
In this paper I analyze one form of intentional death: suicide. Judging suicide as right or wrong is more ambiguous than generally accepted. It is my position that Hellenistic philosophy revaluates archaic traditions concerning death and suicide, which are more embedded in heroic forms of intentional death. This revaluation, especially in Stoicism, reflects two aspects: firstly, the commitment Stoic philosophers place on living the good, moral life, personal integrity, and their willingness to face death as an effect of that commitment; and, secondly, how the Stoics’ concept of suicide is also a political tool that can be used to preserve personal freedom in the face of political tyranny. For the Stoic, death is liberation, and offers not only the oppressed a means of escape, but is also the highest expression of moral freedom. Thus, for the Stoic, suicide is more than a deliberate act of dying for purely individualistic reasons disassociated from any altruistic motives: it becomes the example of personal integrity and freedom; and good, moral living.
The Death of God and Suicide (Why, Why Not) in Modernist Literature
T.
Chandler Haliburton
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
“God is dead.” This
much quoted statement from Friedrich
Nietzsche was, and remains, a blanket characterization of the modern
condition. The modernist period was thus one of mourning. However,
it was not only over the ‘Death of God’, but also the death
of the universe as it was believed to have been. Overcoming or
at least coming to terms with this nihilism was the task facing modernist
writers. When unsuccessful, several fell into tragic states of
despair, and many modernist authors and poets ultimately took their
own lives. Alvarez observed that “The casualty-rate among
the gifted seems out of all proportion, as though the nature of the
artistic undertaking itself and the demands it makes had altered radically”. This
paper considers first these radical alterations. Specifically,
the terrifying spiritual freedom that followed the ‘Death of
God’ and the subsequent burden placed on writers. This
will be explored and linked to the increase in suicide observed by
Alvarez and others (Durkheim, Sheppard). However, as telling
are the instances of suicide among writers (and their characters),
the cases of writers who survived are equally revealing. The
latter directly confronted the modernist collapse of meaning, and in
turn, condemned suicide as also necessarily meaningless. This
effectively pushed their writing towards the realm of the avant-garde
and postmodern.
The ‘disappearance of God,’ along with war
and suicide, changed the significance of death. Traditional Christian
notions placed death as the defining moment of life – a spiritual
transition. In
modernism, the present was all that was left to define life and it offered
no metaphysical significance. While death became more random and
awful, it at the same time became less frightening. Modernist
death – the thing – was not to be feared, only the meaninglessness
of it. Writing in 1916, MacKenna commented that fear of death was
man made and without it “the gateway to suicide would be thrown
open.” This was because suicide could provide a means of
regaining control of death and offer a new form of spiritual transition. However,
this paper concludes by surveying how certain major modernist writers
(from Tolstoy, to Eliot, to Beckett) faced suicide (both personally and
creatively) but survived, and how in doing so, these writers pushed modernism
beyond itself.
Giddens’ Adaptation:Imaginary Suicide in
Reflexive Modernity
Kuo-Kuei
Kao
Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University,
United Kingdom
This essay argues an imaginary mode of suicide at work in Giddens’ discourse of late-modernity. First, Giddens’ early study of suicide is read as a mediator behind his transition from the theory of structuration to that of reflexive modernity, given the problematic status of agency. Moreover, this claim will be demonstrated by Giddens’ revolt against Durkheimian sociology. On the one hand, he coins the type of “attempted suicide” to reverse Durkheim’s sociology of suicide, thereby overturning a structural theory of society into a risk-taking theory of action. On the other hand, he reappropriates Durkheim’s political sociology to forge a link between suicide and reflexive agency. In this sense, Giddens’ early theory of suicide is the disavowed truth of his late theory of reflexive modernity. Accordingly, the problem with Giddens’ theory of society is that the preconditioned notion of attempted suicide plays with the suicido-generic simulation of death, hence avoiding the destructive force of real death. As such, suicide in the sense of a form of challenge to the production of social structure as such is re-totalized as the agential reproduction of social structures. In effect, the politics of reflexive modernization reveals Giddens’ adaptation to a neo-liberal society of the undead, a worldless society of individuals linked by the terror of death without death, imaginary suicide without suicide.
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