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:
partially explains the phenomenon of the suicide note and its mixture of depression and exhibitionism, where self-love becomes hatred and one…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Only the living seem incoherent.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita Édouard Levé.
‘Only optimists commit suicide, the optimists who can no longer be… optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why should they have any to die?’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita Cioran.
One of the most poignant suicide notes I know is simply, Dear Betty: I…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
One always speaks to someone in a suicide note. Suicide notes are attempts at communication. They are a last and usually desperate attempt to communicate – final communications. They are also failed attempts in the sense that the writer is communicating a failure to communicate, expressing the desire to give up in one last attempt at expression. The suicidal person does not want to die alone, but wants to die with another or others, to whom the note is addressed.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Man is stopped by rivers in his passage over the surface of the earth; and rivers, when properly directed, lend their force to the motion of machines, which serve to the use of man.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
life is endlessly replayed as art.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Let’s grant that the capacity for suicide is what, at least partially, picks us out as a species.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Kay Redfield Jamison, a clinical psychologist and author of An Unquiet Mind. She gives an extremely humane and informed personal account of suicidal depression, through to her recovery through a careful combination of psychotherapy and drug therapy. She writes that ‘Suicidal depression is a state of cold, agitated horror and relentless despair. The things you most love in life leach away. Everything is an effort, all day and throughout the night. There is no hope, no point, no nothing.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Just as the man who is hanging himself, after kicking away the stool on which he stood, heading for the final shore, rather than feeling the leap which he is making into the void feels only the rope which holds him, held to the end, held more than ever, bound as he had never been before to the existence he would like to leave.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita Maurice Blanchot.
Jesus nowhere condemns suicide
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Jean Améry (the nom de plume of the Austrian Hanns Mayer) accepts Camus’s premise of an absurd universe but refuses his conclusion that absurd creation renders suicide illegitimate.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
It would be no crime in me to divert the Nile or Danube from its course, were I able to effect such purposes. Where then is the crime of turning a few ounces of blood from their natural chanels!
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
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 (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
It is well known that the most common season for suicide is spring, when everything would appear to be returning to life, and the most popular day of the week for suicide is Monday,
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
It is not at all clear to me that Camus’s argument is sufficient to establish the illegitimacy of suicide and the idea of absurd creation can in no way justify any prohibition of self-killing. Indeed, I have always sensed a tension in Camus between the refusal of hope that is the premise of absurdity, and the hope that informs and infuses his idea of absurd creation. Camus risks giving us back in some new form what he had initially taken away. If suicide is not a legitimate response to the absurd, then absurd creation cannot be a definitive answer to Camus’s opening question: is or is not life worth living?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
In deciding to kill themselves, both the twenty-five-year-old protagonist and Levé himself live eternally. In dying, they live forever: like Hamlet, like the Mona Lisa, like Mrs Ramsay. Ars longa, vita brevis.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
If Suicide be criminal, it must be a transgression of our duty, either to God, our neighbour, or ourselves.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
If I turn aside a stone, which is falling upon my head, I disturb the course of nature, and I invade the peculiar province of the almighty, by lengthening out my life, beyond the period, which, by the general laws of matter and motion, he had assigned to it.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
if God is all-loving, then should not such love extend to permitting the suicide of one of his creatures when their suffering has become too hard to bear? How could an all-loving God demand the continuation of intolerable suffering?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
I saw my father’s corpse about twenty minutes after he died almost exactly twenty years ago. His life was gone and finally his useless, meaningless suffering was over. He looked oddly beautiful. Small and shrunken, his skin brown and wrinkled, like some ancient wooden statue dug up from the earth.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘I object to suicide because I believe in the sanctity of life, and killing oneself is a violent and illegitimate denial of life’s sacredness.’ But what is the implication of this belief? If life is sacred, then it is not the case that only suicide is prohibited: all forms of killing are forbidden. A belief in the sanctity of life entails, for a start, an opposition to capital punishment. To believe that suicide is a crime because life is sacred while also believing in the death penalty (there are many Americans who appear to hold both beliefs) is a sheer contradiction. Similarly, if life is sacred, then all forms of killing are forbidden, for example during wartime. To follow through the logic of the argument for the sanctity of life would also forbid killing in self-defence. What possible justification could there be for killing another person – an attacker, a burglar, a rapist, a junky with a knife – in self-defence if I believe that life is sacred? In order to be consistent, a belief in the sanctity of life has to lead to a complete quietism and utter pacifism (some religious groups, such as The Society of Friends or the Quakers, have nobly tried to live and practice their faith in accordance with such pacifism). Also, if life is sacred, then all life is sacred, and it is also forbidden to take the lives of cows, sheep, chicken or fish in order to feed oneself…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘I’m too sensitive. I need to be slightly numb in order to regain the…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.
I finish the essay by leaning on the wonderfully comic pessimism of Cioran, namely his notion that the problem with the suicidally depressed is that they are too optimistic. Nothing will be saved by taking our own lives, and a belief in suicide as the only way out derives from an arrogant over-estimation of our capacity for salvation through self-destruction.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
I do not think that I am necessarily right in my views on suicide, nor do I think that I am particularly well-qualified to give them. What the reader will find in the following essay are impressions based on observation and reading. Nothing more.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Hume says, if the divine order means the causal laws created by God, then it must always be wrong to contravene such laws. But if that is the case, then any form of sickness, wounding or malady must not be treated since it is at odds with the laws of nature and divine will. Thus, the entire medical profession itself, insofar as it seeks to ameliorate the condition of the sick, should be outlawed.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Hamlet-like inner-spiralling self-doubt.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Freud’s point, besides the mumbo-jumbo about ‘object-cathexis’, is crystal clear: given our intense self-love, in order to kill ourselves we have to turn ourselves into objects. More precisely, we have to turn ourselves into objects that we hate. Thus, suicide is strictly speaking impossible. I cannot kill myself. What I kill is the hated object…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Freud gives us the recipe for this cocktail with chilling clarity in his brilliant paper, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, from 1917. If mourning is the grief that we feel in response to the death of someone beloved that leads us to lament and plaint, then in melancholia…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
For Camus, indifference does not lead to cynicism, but to an experience of the world that holds it at a certain distance, but which is open to both the world’s beauty and brutality and which approaches it with tenderness and understanding.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Football season is over. No more games. No more bombs. No more walking. No more fun. No more swimming. 67. 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No fun for anybody. 67, you are getting greedy. Act your old age. Relax. This won’t hurt.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita o bilhete de Hunter S. Thompson.
Euripides’s heroine Medea does not kill herself, but kills her two sons out of revenge for the wrong done to her by her husband, Jason. There are…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Epicurean wisdom: as you know nothing of death, you should do nothing to bring it about: live instead.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Donne confesses that ‘a sickly inclination’ compelled him to ponder the question of suicide, and when this sickness befell him, ‘methinks I have the Keys of the Prison in mine own hand and no Remedy presents itself so soon to my Heart, as my sword’.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
David Hume said in his brilliant, short, posthumously published essay on suicide, ‘I believe that no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping.’ The
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Consider the inverse of this position. If I have a duty to society or the ‘community’ not to kill myself, then doesn’t society have a reciprocal duty not to kill me or threaten me with death, either in the form of capital punishment or through military conscription, where I might die in a theatre of war or a terrorist attack?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Cobain writes in huge capital letters: ‘I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!’ When Courtney Love read out Cobain’s note at his funeral, she finished by saying to the crowd, ‘Just tell him he’s a fucker, OK? … And that you love him.’ The ambivalence of Cobain’s suicide note of love and hate is captured precisely in…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Christian arguments against suicide turn on the extension of the sixth commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ to the questionable interpretation that this commandment forbids self-killing as well. I do not see the entailment between forbidding the murder of others – a wholly legitimate aspiration – to the prohibition of suicide, which is premised on a misunderstanding of the nature of human liberty. In addition, the prohibition of self-killing poses a huge problem in the interpretation of cases of martyrdom and the deaths of innumerable saints, particularly when one considers the early history of Christianity. The Christian martyrs chose to go to their deaths out of love of God and hatred of the state or any other form of temporal, pagan authority. If the crucifixion of Christ himself can be viewed as a quasi-suicidal act performed out of love, then…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Camus’s The Outsider, where the anti-hero, Meursault, faced with the prospect of beheading by the guillotine for the thoughtlessly racist killing of an unnamed ‘Arab’, concludes with the words, ‘I opened myself for the first time to the tender indifference of the world.’ He goes on, ‘I understood that I had been happy and I was still happy.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
‘Call no man happy until he is dead.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.