Notes on Suicide
Ensaio de Simon Critchley sobre o suicídio, seguido de Of Suicide, de David Hume. As citações guardadas daqui aparecem abaixo.
138 notas · última:
‘Without suicide, no salvation.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.
willy-nilly.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Why not try and turn our selves inside out, away from the finally hateful inward suffering, and outwards and upwards towards others, not in the name of some right or duty, but out of love?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Why not linger a while in the face of what Nietzsche calls ‘strict, hard factuality’?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Why not calm down and enjoy the world’s melancholy spectacle that spreads out so capaciously and delightfully before us?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Which brings me back to my suicide note creative writing workshop, as I didn’t recount the best part of the story. After I’d finished my little talk, I distributed small white index cards and invited everyone present to write their own suicide notes.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
When the horror of pain prevails over the love of life: When a voluntary action anticipates the effect of blind causes; it is only in consequence of those powers and principles, which he has implanted in his creatures.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them, “What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.”
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.
What we admire in the deaths of the saints is their freely chosen capacity to act out of faith in a way that overrides…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
What possible duty could I have to myself to continue in such a state if the alternative is something I wish for?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
What is most striking about Hamlet’s speeches is not their delusional quality, but their perspicacity. What he complains about – the nature of grief, the futility of war, the illusory power of theatre, the obscurity of our parents’ desire (especially our mother’s) and most of all his doubts about the nature of existence – is powerfully true. The ceaseless self-accusations of the melancholic are very often accurate. What we see in Hamlet is a powerful cocktail of depression and exhibitionism.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
What is most shocking about Hume’s arguments is that they still have the capacity to shock, some 240 years after they were written. This is because the moral and legal framework in which suicide is viewed and judged is still tributary to the Christian doctrine that Hume so elegantly demolishes.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
what is love? I think Oscar Wilde is right when he defines love in De Profundis as giving what one does have and receiving that over which one has no power. To love is to commit oneself to another not without the guarantee that love will be returned, but with the hope that it might be. Love takes place in the subjunctive mood: it may be, it might be, would that it were the case. The logic of love is akin to the logic of grace. I give something that is truly beyond my capacity to control, I commit myself to it completely, but there can be no assurance that love will be reciprocated. At any point in a love relation, the beloved can and must be able to say ‘I love you not.’ If this is not the case, if the beloved cannot refuse love, then love is reduced to coercive control, to contractual obligation and command. None of these is love. If God is all-loving, then he, she or it has to allow us to refuse that love and take our life and death into our own hands.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
What happens in depression, for Freud, is that the self turns against itself, the subject makes itself into an object, and complains bitterly. ‘Why, what an ass am I!’ as Hamlet says. In depression, the self sees itself ass-backwards, as it were, and finds itself horribly wanting and deficient. The self’s sadistic urges flip over into a lacerating masochism, where we ceaselessly berate ourselves…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
We either quietly think that they were being foolish, selfish and irresponsible, or we decide that their actions were caused by factors outside of their control (severe depression, chronic addiction, and so on). That is, if they acted freely in killing themselves, we implicitly condemn them; but if we declare that their actions were constrained by uncontrollable behavioural factors like depression, we remove their freedom.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
We are God’s property, as it were. But if so, humans are queer or weird property because we still somehow have the impression of acting under our own volition. People are not pot plants sitting passively in some divine greenhouse. However the capacity for free will is understood, it permits us to act against divine will. Although I might wish to align my imperfect will with the perfect will of God in order to act well, such alignment is, and moreover must, never be attained. If I claim that my will is God’s will, then I am implicitly claiming that all my actions are divinely sanctioned, which is hubristic, if not sinful.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
[W]hat punishment can human laws inflict on one who has withdrawn himself from their reach? They can only act upon what he has left behind him, his reputation and fortune: on the former, by an ignominious burial in the highway, with a stake driven through his body; on the latter, by a forfeiture of all his goods and chattels to the king: hoping that his care for either his reputation, or the welfare of his family, would be some motive to restrain him from so desperate and wicked an act.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita William Blackstone.
‘Voluntary death is the privilege of the human’, and that ‘a suicide is a human being. He already belongs to the earth, but the earth still belongs to him – and it is beautiful.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
To be human is to have the capacity, at each and every moment, of killing oneself. Incarceration, humiliation, disappointment, disease – the world can do all of this to us, but it cannot remove the possibility of suicide.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Those looking for real expertise in the psychopathology and neurobiology of suicidal depression can look elsewhere, for example in the writings of Redfield Jamison, such as the Night Falls Fast.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Thomas Hobbes’s idea of reality as matter and motion
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
This, of course, is the truth of Albert Camus’s idea of absurd creation, a notion explicitly refused by Levé. For Camus, we inhabit an absurd universe: without hope, without God, but still with the overwhelming presence of sin. Such is the consequence of radical freedom for Camus, which is neither a relief nor a joy, but rather a bitterly acknowledged fact. Freedom is a fate from which I can take flight, but which I can never escape.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
this is the reason why, he adds, people who commit suicide with firearms shoot themselves in the head rather than the heart. They want to kill that terrible master. This is Freud’s point. Suicide is the determination to rid ourselves of what enslaves us: the mind, the head,…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
think through the question of suicide in the only way I know – in writing
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
There is undisputedly a correlation between social media use and suicidal feelings and behaviour.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
there is a further twist to the dialectic of the suicide note. The hatred that permits us to overcome our self-love and kill ourselves is also the occasion for the most extreme exclamations of love. It is as though the intensity of self-hatred allows a final, heartfelt and equally intense proclamation of love. These twinned energies of love…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The wish of a terminally ill person is very often not so much happiness as death with dignity, without feeling they have acted illegally or immorally. Hume argues that suicide ‘may be free from imputation of guilt and blame’.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The Traité argues that Moses, Jesus and Mohammed are three imposters who have deceived humankind by imposing their ‘silly ideas of God’ and teaching ‘the people to receive them without examination’.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The suicide experiences themselves bound as never before to the existence they rationally or irrationally wanted to leave behind. If suicide is an irrational leap, then why on earth should we rationally take it?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
the shocking suicide of the Smith family was widely reported in England. Richard Smith and his wife, living in dreadful poverty in London, shot their daughter before hanging themselves. In his extended and carefully reasoned farewell letter, Smith, a bookbinder by trade, makes allusion to Radicati’s pamphlet. He writes that he and his family had decided to take leave of this friendless world rather than live in misery. They made this decision in complete cognizance of the laws prohibiting suicide, adding that it is ‘indifferent to us where our bodies are laid’. The Smiths’ (and one ineluctably thinks of Morrissey – heaven knows I’m miserable now) only wish was for an epitaph, which reads, Without a name, for ever silent, dumb; Dust, Ashes, Nought else is within this Tomb; Where we were born or bred it matters not, Who were our parents, or hath us begot; We were, but now are not; think no more of us, For as we are, so you be turned to Dust.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The research is beginning to show that the effects of social media use are serious, far-reaching and are getting worse; worse for females than males; and worse still for young females. In response to the question: has there been a significant increase in incidences of mood disorders, self-harm, suicidal ideation and suicide since 2010? Then the answer is yes.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita Cioran.
The question of the meaning of life is the wrong question and I humbly suggest that we stop asking it. Our minds will never stop rummaging through the drawers of self-doubt, self-disgust and self-pity in order to find some piece of forgotten dirty moral laundry. What is important is the ability to get life to stand still in order to look at it tenderly and with care, to cultivate slower forms of attention without renouncing life in some sovereign violent act. One should go on.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The practice of philosophy, then, begins with a suicide. To philosophize is to learn how to die, Socrates argues in the Phaedo,
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
the point is that the justification for suicide on the basis of rationality has to confront the fact that reason cannot peer into death and make any rational assessment. Dead man don’t do discourse.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
the only guarantee of the happiness or blessedness of a life consists in the story that can be told about it after one’s demise.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The odd thing about melancholics – which, lest we forget, includes very many of us – is that they don’t keep quiet, but tend to proclaim endlessly and volubly about their misery.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The Noonday Demon, Andrew Solomon has very helpfully begun this work by introducing four categories of suicide: (i) a manic, dire, impulsive and sudden act; (ii) revenge, or self-obliteration as payback for a felt wound; (iii) suicides which are planned, with complex and often lengthy notes, seemingly pragmatic but with a deeply faulty logic, ‘as though they were organizing a holiday in outer space’, as Solomon writes; and (iv) those planned through a reasonable logic, because of physical illness, mental instability or some catastrophic change in life’s circumstances. To be clear, those people included under (iv) might be mistaken in their view, in particular the consequences that their action might have on their nearest and dearest, but we cannot say that they are deluded.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
the mind is a great servant but a…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The man who has never imagined his own annihilation, who has not anticipated recourse to the rope, the bullet, poison or the sea, is a degraded galley slave or a worm crawling upon the cosmic carrion. The world can take everything from us, can forbid us everything, but no one has the power to keep us from wiping ourselves out.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.