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:
‘The life of this world is just a game and accumulation of possessions and children. What God has is better for me than this.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.
the life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The French had even more stringent posthumous punishments for suicide. In 1670, Louis XIV declared a criminal ordinance for suicide, where it was decreed that the corpse must be drawn through the streets face down and then hanged or thrown on a garbage dump. Their property was also confiscated. The Sun King tolerated poorly the suicide of France’s sons. In an English commentary on Chinese law from 1899, particular attention is paid to suicide pacts created for the profit of the surviving party. If it was proven that the parents entered into a suicide pact in order to aid the surviving child, then that child was to be decapitated.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
the desire to keep the details of suicide secret is questionable. As everyone knows, the Golden Gate Bridge is a popular suicide destination. Yet all the suicides jump from the side of the bridge that faces San Francisco. No one wants to jump from the side that faces out to the Pacific Ocean. Peculiar, no? It is, unless one accepts that suicide is very often a public act, an act of publicity.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The decision to end one’s life in old age as a consequence of a terminal diagnosis and intolerable physical suffering is a very different matter from a sudden violent act in a moment of manic exuberance. The self-slaughter of a betrayed lover is very different from the carefully planned insanity of a suicide bomber.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The awful prospect that Blanchot so powerfully describes is that all the suicidal person experiences after the leap into the dark is the rope that ties them ever more tightly to the existence they wanted to leave.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
The analysis of melancholy now shows that the ego can kill itself only if, owing to the return of object-cathexis, it can treat itself as an object – if it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Tacitus reports that, being unable to die by bleeding because of advanced age and a frugal diet, Seneca asked for poison, like Socrates, but that also didn’t work. Eventually, he was placed in a bath of hot water and suffocated to death by his servants.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
superstition, being founded on false opinion, must immediately vanish, when true philosophy has inspired juster sentiments of superior powers.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Suicide, the French writer and artist Edouard Levé tells the story of a 25-year-old man, born on 25 December (a kind of Christ figure, but that is rather too obvious a red herring), who is never named. The narrative is written in the second person singular, ‘Since you seldom spoke, you were rarely wrong.’ This has an effect that is at once impersonal and intimate, both chillingly distant and deeply personal. Having just left his house dressed for a tennis match with his wife, the 25-year-old claims he has forgotten something, turns back, walks down into his basement, picks up a shotgun and shoots himself in the head. Just before doing so, the young man had opened up a comic book to a specific page. This is his suicide note, which is overlooked because, before his gesture can be understood, his wife inadvertently closes the book and loses the page. Levé then killed himself ten days after handing in the manuscript to his publisher, on 15 October 2007. That’s it.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Suicide notes can also be disarmingly straightforward and honest. In his final two years, George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak, was in intense pain caused by a disorder affecting his spine. On 14 March 1932, Eastman shot himself in the heart, leaving a short note, ‘To my friends: my work is done. Why wait?’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
suicide notes already cited converge on the idea that there can be no alternative to suicide, other than to suffer further humiliation. Once taken, the decision seems irrevocable.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Suicide might grant life coherence, but only by robbing it of complexity by viewing it through the instant of one’s death.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘Suicide is one of man’s distinctive characteristics, one of his discoveries’, Cioran writes, ‘no animal is capable of it, and the angels have scarcely guessed its existence’.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita Cioran.
Suicide is like an oxygen tank from which we can breathe in a world that has become, in Hamlet’s words, a prison.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Suicide is a little like God. If someone asks me, ‘Do you believe in God?’, I’m always inclined to reply, ‘Which one? There are so many.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Suicide, he concludes, is ‘the only way, that we can then be useful to society, by setting an example, which, if imitated, would preserve to every one his chance for happiness in life, and would effectively free him from all danger of misery’.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Suicide can cause considerable emotional harm on one’s loved ones, as well as material harm, in the form of economic effects.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Suicide can and does cause immense grief to those we love and are close to and may also have significant effects on those further away.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Such is perhaps what Nietzsche calls the pessimism of strength as opposed to an optimism of naivety and weakness. True pessimists don’t kill themselves. Is that not enough?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Stoics like Seneca took a more radical view of suicide, arguing that the brevity of human life was no source of woe. When a human life no longer flourishes because of bad fortune, one is permitted to end it.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Spinoza puts it, ‘A free man thinks of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Spinoza argues that a free human being is one who lives according to reason alone and is not governed by fear. To be free is to desire the good directly and to act and live in such a way as to persist in this desire without flinching or failing. This is why the free human being thinks of nothing less than death. Human life is simply an aspect of the vast, living vibrancy of a universe of matter. As Flaubert proposed a couple of centuries later, Spinoza’s vision is extremely seductive, and it constitutes Saint Anthony’s final and irresistible temptation: matter is God.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.
Solomon’s categories are a beginning, it seems to me, but we would need to add more categories, such as the forms of suicide-homicide discussed in my essay, or the apparently inadvertent deaths that occur increasingly through fatal mixtures of drugs and alcohol, and where the question of intention is very hard to pin down.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
So intense is the ego’s self-love, which we have come to recognize as the primal state from which instinctual life proceeds, and so vast is the amount of narcissistic libido which we see liberated in the fear that emerges at a threat to life, that we…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
So great is our horror of death, that when it presents itself under any form, besides that to which a man has endeavoured to reconcile his imagination, it acquires new terrors, and overcomes his feeble courage.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Since the age of seven, I’ve become hateful toward all humans in general … I’m too much of an erratic, moody baby! I don’t have the passion anymore, and so remember, it’s better to burn out than…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘Shall we all die? We shall die all. All shall die we. Die all we shall.’ Epitaph in Cunwallow Churchyard, Cornwall, England
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.
Seneca counsels that a wise person, a philosopher, ‘lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can’.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
sagacious Epicurus: when death is, I am not; when I am, death is not; therefore why worry?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Rust Cohle says in the HBO series True Detective, ‘I lack the constitution for suicide.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Religions like Christianity prohibit suicide because of the threat of insubordination that it poses: the refusal of the lordship of God or King or Church or state.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Rationality is usually combined with severe depression, which causes havoc with one’s reason.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Radicati’s simple thesis in his Dissertation is that individuals are free to choose their own death. This right to suicide was inspired by ancient arguments, notably from the Stoics, that suicide is a legitimate act and an honorable gesture of farewell from a state of unbearablepain, whether physical or psychical.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘Philosophy Professor makes STUDENTS NUTS’, which I rather liked.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Perverse as it may seem, the same might be true of suicide notes: in marking and explaining the decision to end a life, they endlessly outlive it.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Perhaps the closest we come to dying is through writing, in the sense that writing is a leave-taking from life, a temporary abandonment of the world and one’s petty preoccupations in order to try to see things more clearly. In writing, one steps back and steps outside life in order to view it more dispassionately, both more distantly and more proximately. With a steadier eye. One can lay things to rest in writing: ghosts, hauntings, regrets, and the memories that flay us alive.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Perhaps it is the capacity for suicide, to make the decision for voluntary self-destruction, that picks us out as a species and distinguishes us as human.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Passive social media use (called PSMU in some of the literature) induces fatigue, loneliness, depression, a kind of seventeenth-century Pascalian ennui, and the sense that our lives are inadequate and pointless in comparison to the manufactured glamour, righteous moralized rage and simple falsehood that stares back at us continuously from our tiny screens in an uninterrupted, rising flood tide.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).