This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced – their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response?
From Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas's public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond – this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.
This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced – their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response?
From Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas's public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond – this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.
Usurping Suicide: The Political Resonances of Individual Deaths
256
Usurping Suicide: The Political Resonances of Individual Deaths
256eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
This book examines suicide like no other. Unconcerned with the individual dispositions that lead a person to commit such an act, Usurping Suicide focuses on the reception suicides have produced – their political, social and cultural implications. How does a particular act of suicide enable a collective significance to be attached to it? And what contextual circumstances predispose a politicised public response?
From Mohamed Bouazizi's self-immolation during regime change in Tunisia to Dimitris Christoulas's public shooting at a time of increased political upheaval in Greece, and beyond – this remarkable work examines how the individuality of the act of suicide poses a disturbing symbolic conundrum for the dominant liberal order.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781786991010 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Publishing |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Mike Hajimichael is an associate professor at The University of Nicosia, Cyprus, in the Department of Communications.
Milena Katsarska lectures in American studies at Plovdiv University, Bulgaria.
Theodoros A. Spyros is a post-doctoral fellow of historical sociology at the University of Crete, and adjunct academic staff in the sociology and anthropology of sports at the Hellenic Open University.
Suman Gupta is a Senior Lecturer in Literature at the Open University; Director of the International Collaborative Project on Globalization, Identity Politics and Social Conflict; and Honorary Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Research in Human Rights, Roehampton University. He is the author of six books - including Marxism, History and Intellectuals, Corporate Capitalism and Political Philosophy, and The Replication of Violence: Thoughts on International Terrorism After 11 September 2001, and has edited several books and published numerous scholarly papers.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
On suicide archives and political resonances
Suman Gupta
Approach of this study
This study examines a distinctive situation, the general contours of which may be outlined as follows.
A person commits suicide in a public space, in a manner which ensures that only this individual's life is extinguished. This person has not been in the public eye; on the contrary, the person has been veiled from public attention by ordinary circumstances and unexceptional conduct. More importantly, this person has made no explicit claim on behalf of any particular political alignment in committing suicide, and no such alignment has discernibly driven this person towards suicide. The suicide cannot be understood as enacted for or on behalf of a political party or organisation; it is recognised as an individual act. Nevertheless, political resonances accrue around this individual act after its occurrence, and specifically anti-establishment resonances. It is received in some tractable way as if the suicide were a protest against, or has subversive implications for, the prevailing political establishment. The political resonances may be of two sorts: active, in feeding an exacerbation of anti-establishment action, being recruited to oppositional political (including party political) advocacy or into the mobilisation of collective protests; or tacit, in calling upon establishment agents (such as government spokespersons, experts, investigators or publicists) to diffuse antiestablishment resonances (by censorship, propaganda, selective interpretation, etc.).
The anti-establishment political resonances of such an individual suicide have to do with the manner in which this act is articulated so as to generate a response, whether active or tacit. For this study, the articulation of the act is not a straightforward matter of recognising what the individual intended or what their motives were. In fact, this study does not investigate motives and intentions, and it does not speculate on their veracity or establish their probity. The articulation of the act, in this instance, is not to do with how the act was produced but with how it was received and acted upon. It is understood, then, not as an expression of the individual's intent but as embedded in what we dub the suicide texts that appear with the act. How the political reverberations of such an individual suicide appear in any given period after the act depends upon the aggregate of suicide texts that are available: we think of this aggregate of suicide texts as the suicide archive that pertains to the case of suicide in question.
The suicide archive for such an act is a complex formation which is available to interpretative and affective response, and which consists of everything that renders a response possible and allows for the tracing of such a response in suicide texts. Suicide texts that form the suicide archive may include explicit statements by the person committing suicide (such as a suicide note), the manner and setting of its performance (in public or private, as spectacle or ritual, etc.), the testimonials of witnesses, and so on, so that intent, motive and significance can be attributed by those contemplating the act. The archive also includes suicide texts in the form of records for public purposes, such as reports and media accounts, and findings and assessments by various investigators (for the legal record, for news reportage, etc.). The suicide archive further incorporates possible linkages and framings that may already be publicly anticipated: for example, in relation to other such acts and their suicide texts, in terms of pressing social concerns, everyday associations and common-sense speculations. The suicide archive is thus a fluid formation: it is constantly updated and modified initially and remains open to change even after it becomes relatively stable. The relationship between a suicide archive and its (activated or diffused) political resonance is not a linear one. Every new turn in political responses generates further suicide texts which in turn modify the suicide archive, and each updated version of the suicide archive has a bearing upon further political responses. How the suicide archive is shaped and received depends on the contexts and concerns of those contributing to it.
This study focuses on the relationship of the suicide archives for specific cases to their anti-establishment political resonances, which were either tractably activated or diffused between 2010 and 2015. The four chapters that follow are devoted to analyses of case-specific suicide archives. The cases of suicide in question appeared against the background of the so-called "Arab Spring" and, in a more sustained way, the financial crisis and anti-austerity protests in Europe from 2008 onwards, particularly in Greece, Bulgaria, Italy and Spain. In analysing such cases we engage with important contradictions in the dominant ideological disposition and political practices of the present.
This, then, is not a study of suicide but a study of present-day political regimes through an analysis of specific suicide archives and the resistances they instantiate. The cases in question here are of sudden or unanticipated suicides rather than slow suicides that seem purposive (such as starvation protests leading to death). This spare outline of our study's theme is variously sharpened or complicated as we proceed. The remainder of this chapter explores some of the conceptual and methodological predicates that underpin this study.
Conceptual strands of suicide studies
The above outline of our theme is carefully phrased to draw attention away from the impetuses that motivate suicides and to focus attention squarely on their reception and responses. In this instance, motives are matters of attribution based on what the suicide archive offers – so they too are within the field of response and only indicative. This emphasis is worth underlining because it differentiates this study from the great majority of research into suicide. The study of suicide has been largely concerned with establishing the impetuses (motives, intentions, impulses and objectives, whether individual or social) that precede the act or phenomenon of suicide. Further, such research has made dealing with suicide one of its key drivers (usually the prevention, reduction or management of the impetuses behind suicide), sometimes even where this appears not to be an explicit aim. Both establishing the impetuses for and dealing with suicide are irrelevant to this study. Nevertheless, there is much in this field of research, even with those guiding concerns, that is relevant to this study. It is from this field that the theoretical underpinnings of the analyses offered in subsequent chapters are drawn. There is both obvious recourse to the existing research field to take into account (to studies of suicide protest, for instance), and more tangentially relevant concepts to tease out from such research.
It is therefore expedient to clearly place our approach within the larger field of suicide studies at the outset. Doing so is, of course, necessary to hone our approach; it also has the advantage of delimiting references from a superlatively productive scholarly field. Researchers into suicide have long regarded the scale of the relevant literature with trepidation. Writing early in the twentieth century on the subject, Maurice Halbwachs (1978 [1930]: 3) contemplated an incomplete bibliography of 3,771 works; early in the twenty-first century, John C. Weaver (2009: 19) starts by enumerating early bibliographies of suicide studies up to Norman Farberow's (1969), which covers the period from 1897 to 1967 and lists approximately 3,500 works – and simply notes thereafter: "Libraries today hold an astonishing number of recent titles."
The difference between our approach and that of the wider field of suicide studies, along with our dependence on it, calls for some deft negotiations. There are a number of more or less dominant conceptual strands of suicide studies, from the agendas of all of which this study can be differentiated to a greater or lesser degree, and all of which are relevant here to a large or small extent. The distinctive thrust of this study is most cogently expressed in terms of its agenda. Bearing the above-stated objective in mind (a study of current political regimes through the analysis of specific suicide archives and the resistances they instantiate), the salient point to note about each currently dominant strand is as follows: why is this sort of research into suicide undertaken? The definitions and methodologies that characterise each strand are usually conditional to its predetermined agenda. How suicide is defined, in particular, reveals the predetermined character of the agenda and is always worth noting (multiple definitions of suicide are usefully addressed in sociological terms by Douglas (1970 [1967]: Appendix II) and in philosophical terms by Cholbi (2011: Chapter 1)). Once the predetermination of agenda is taken into account, each strand enables some clarification of the ways in which suicide texts and suicide archives, and related political repercussions, are generated and the conceptual nuances at work within them – which are useful to this study. Some of these conceptual nuances are relevant here in ways that go against the grain of the strand of suicide studies in which they appear; some are straightforwardly adopted here in the spirit of the strand where they are found.
With a view to clarifying the thrust of this study in relation to four of the currently dominant strands of suicide studies – suicidology and prevention of suicide, sociology and suicide rates, philosophical horizons, and in terms of academic and cultural reflexivity – a strand-by-strand consideration of the field follows.
Strand 1: suicidology and suicide prevention
The kind of research that is now called "suicidology", established mainly through the energetic efforts of Norman Farberow and Edwin Shneidman since the 1950s, regards suicide as a pathological issue, a result of psychological dysfunction. It comes with an inbuilt agenda of preventing suicide through the treatment of individuals and via measures of social control of individuals. In a way, this is the current authorised strand, in that such research is powerfully backed by governmental, non-governmental and corporate organisations and policy, especially by the medical and mental health establishment. Much of this prolific and multivalent field of research is devoted to the social, economic and cultural determinants of suicide, insofar as they offer insights into the psychology of potential suicides with a view to preventing suicide. The definition of suicide that underpins suicidology research – and to which Shneidman devoted a book – provides a useful if hurried purchase on this approach:
My principal assertion about suicide has two branches. The first is that suicide is a multifaceted event and that biological, cultural, sociological, interpersonal, intrapsychic, logical, conscious and unconscious, and philosophical elements are present, in various degrees, in each suicide event.
The second branch of my assertion is that, in the distillation of each suicide event its essential element is a psychological one; that is to say, each suicidal drama occurs in the mind of a unique individual. Suicide is purposive. Its purpose is to respond to or redress certain psychological needs. (Shneidman 1985: 202)
Because it is given as an assertion, the weight of authority is conferred on this definition – the sort of authority that demands attention. Assertion, as opposed to circumspection, is relatively rare in academic discourse, though commonplace in management and governmental discourses. The two branches of the definition then make two linked moves. First, various disciplinary approaches to suicide are acknowledged, while they are tacitly disinvested of social and political (collective) content; their relevance is confined only to "each suicide event". Second, the definition reiterates that confinement (so that "each suicide event" becomes the province of "a unique individual") by making all the disciplinary approaches secondary to the prerogatives of psychology ("the essential element"). In this definition, a tactical battle against many directions of research is thus won, and the territorial occupation of one area of research is thereby established. In the process, a dictum of authority is also established: the individual is the focus of management and control in suicidology and suicide prevention. Moreover, a particular understanding of the individual is foregrounded – and is taken up via a small detour.
Evidently, suicidology makes the determination of individual intentions and motives its main focus, which immediately places it at some considerable distance from this study. Moreover, our interest in anti-establishment political resonances is diametrically opposed to suicidology's disinvestment from political analysis by focusing on the particular act and the unique individual. But our approach cannot be indifferent to suicidology, the authorised presence of which in academic and establishment – state, medical, corporate – practices means that it is a critical part of the suicide texts we are concerned with. Our interest in suicidology, however, does not address the latter in its own terms but rather argues against those terms. Pursuing this interest involves drawing suicidology as an object within the critical purview extended to suicide texts here. Usefully, such a perspective is far from being unique in contemplating suicidology; strong critiques of suicidology are available, in a polemical vein by Thomas Szasz (1999) and in a measured and convincing analysis by Ian Marsh (2010).
Szasz (1999) turns suicidology's understanding of suicide as a pathological issue that concerns the individual on itself, so to speak, by taking a strong liberal individualist (akin to libertarian) position. He argues that such an approach is a means for the state and the medical establishment to disempower individuals and curtail individual freedom. Marsh (2010) makes a related but broader argument, not by focusing on a loose first principle of freedom and the limits of the state but by drawing on Michel Foucault's methods. Foucault's critical methodology usefully enables habitual social practices and norms to be put into perspective by teasing out the rationales of power – and thereby the exercise of power – that operate through them. In other words, these practices and norms are scrutinised as cohering within a structure of knowledge that embeds control and compliance. At the same time, the methodology also demonstrates the contingent character of the structures of knowledge and rationales of power by historical tracing: that is, by laying out the logic of their development according to historical circumstances and agencies. Importantly, the focus on structures of knowledge allows reflective attention to be paid to knowledge production – specialist pursuits and their complicity with power. Understandably, Foucault's methods have been influential in critical scholarship on suicide and reappear later. Marsh uses all the dimensions of Foucault's method in his analysis of suicidology. This includes, first, a systematic examination of the routinized and normalized practices of suicidology as a "contemporary regime of truth" through which establishment power is exercised. And, second, a historical account is presented of how the discourse of suicide as pathological emerged as the dominant approach from a range of other discourses. This "regime of truth", Marsh argues, is designed to disperse other, more socially and politically disturbing, nuances of suicide, "as [an] act of protest or resistance, of self-determination, choice or will, an event of moral, criminal or political concern, even as a subject of philosophical concern" (ibid.: 4).
The point at which Szasz and Marsh converge is suicidology's construction of the individual who commits or contemplates suicide. Regarded as persons with a psychological dysfunction and subject to pathological disorder, and as objects of mental health concern, suicidal individuals are divested of responsibility for themselves. Thus regarded, their motives and intentions can be disregarded, especially if they are inconvenient to establishment norms. They become involuntary symptoms of a malaise and therefore devoid of rational judgement (which is ceded automatically to the authority of the psychologist), and suicide is thus removed from the possibility of political resonance. Emphasising the voluntariness of the act of suicide is therefore essential to understanding the political resonance of that act. In Marsh's words:
If suicide can be conceived as voluntary, at least to some degree, then the door is also opened to consideration of the act in political terms [...] Such a position then opens up the possibility of interpreting suicide in terms of resistance, refutation or protest. Power relations and questions of social justice and inequalities could come more to the fore in discussions of suicide. (Marsh 2010: 73–4)
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Usurping Suicide"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Suman Gupta, Milena Katsarska, Theodoros A. Spyros and Mike Hajimichael.
Excerpted by permission of Zed Books Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction1. On Suicide Archives and Political Resonances - Suman Gupta
2. The Irresistible Rise and Fall of Posthumous Bouazizi - Suman Gupta
3. Austerity Annuls the Individual: Dimitris Christoulas and the Greek Financial Crisis - Theodoros A. Spyros and Mike Hajimichael
4. Self-Immolations in Bulgaria: A Quietly Accumulating Record - Milena Katsarska
5. Self-Effacing Suicides and Troubled Talk - Suman Gupta