❝ Citação
It might sound to the reader as if I am making a straightforwardly libertarian anti-religious argument about suicide, namely that I should be free to choose the time, space and means of my death when I wish. This position perhaps has something to recommend it, but sadly it is also flawed. If I claim that I have the right to suicide, the right to decide about my own death, then the major premise of this claim is that I enjoy complete self-possession, self-ownership or sovereignty over myself. It conceives of the relation to my self in analogy with the relation to my possessions, like a computer or a fridge. But do I enjoy self-ownership in the same manner in which I own a fridge? Not at all. Whatever my ‘self’ might be, it is something that is partially my own, but also partially shared with others, either those who formed me without my choosing them, like my parents, siblings and sadistic elementary school teachers, or those whom I choose to share my life with, like my friends and comrades, and those whom I love, like my spouse and children. It is something of a banality to say that we are relational beings, but that doesn’t stop it being true. If the right to suicide flows from some idea of self-ownership, then I would be inclined to say that we do not own ourselves. It is not that we are completely owned by others, but self-possession is something possessed with others, alongside them. Life is not lived in some lofty independence. We are dependent rational creatures and such dependency is not a limitation of my freedom. It is its condition. Think back to my fridge. To what extent is it mine? I might have paid for it, but it is something I share with the people I live with: family, guests, visitors and subletters. My computer might feel like it’s mine, but the machine on which I am writing is marked on the underside with a prison-like serial number and an indelible sticker proclaiming ‘Property of The New School’. The problem with any claim to the right to suicide based on self-ownership is that it is simply the dialectical inversion of the claims to sovereignty that we saw above in the quotations from Blackstone’s commentaries on common law. If I choose to rebel against the idea that suicide is prohibited because it is a double crime against the sovereignty of God and King, then that does not entail that I am sovereign over myself. If I choose to refuse God and King, then that does not entail that I am my own God or King, like crazy Robinson Crusoe driven to psychotic delusions on his desert island. Such is the lie of all forms of possessive individualism. Sovereignty is something shared and divided in the complex networks of dependency that constitute a human life. In relation to the question of suicide, claims to sovereignty very quickly become murky.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley.