Katrina Jaworski on suicide

http://www.unisa.edu.au/hawkeinstitute/publications/foucault-25-years/jaworski.pdf


Articles like this one are quite amazing for me because they seem to turn over and around quite obvious things and yet, there must be something totally not obvious since Foucault can actually say about suicide that it's the end of power when it is in fact the success of power over the individual. 

But in Foucault's time like in my mother's, the individuals still thought that if they committed suicide, they were giving their great individual affirmation against society, their individualistic "victory" and it was only the confirmation of their defeat! Not that I would "judge" anyone for taking their lives but that I'd argue that no one takes his or her life if they are in a creative process.




Elena 6th Oct 2011
Rereading this article it's clearer what the dilemma for the author is: understanding that there is no such thing as pure individuality and that everything is connected. The premises on which the article is based are not clear but the questioning of the issue is so very worthy. 


One idea I would add and think worth exploring further is that when we talk about the individual we are not talking about individuality, that is, when we talk about and individual we are talking about a "moving being", a moving being in his or her own being, a "changing" being. An individual's "act" is never independent from the whole and the more "original" it seems, the more faithful to the whole it is. The individuality that the individual can bring to an act is related not to their connectedness or disconnectedness to the whole but to how they themselves have been "constituted" within that whole. The "mark" of an individual on an act does not make any of their acts independent from the whole, it simply puts on the particular "color" that they've painted and been painted with. A Picasso is not a Picasso because it is disconnected from the life of his people and times and his times are not disconnected from all of time, but because all that "life" and "people" that participated in his development are put through the "sieve" of Picasso's individuality and reformulated in his art. It is not that the individual is separate from the whole but that life is reinstated, re-elaborated and re-structures anew in every individual so that "life" continues to actualize and transform itself. 


If we looked at the phenomenon from the point of view of the cells within an individual, each cell, although short lived, carries "life" for a short period of the organisms existence. It is a fact that each cell is free enough to act against the organism and develop a cancer and in that capacity resides its individualism but it is also a fact that it can support and enhance the individual's life experience. The fact that whether it develops "cancer" or "life" is not dependent on it's sole individuality but on the general state of the human being that it lives in, gives an accurate parallel of the place of the individual within society. If he or she commits suicide or wins the nobel prize does not depend solely on him or her or solely on the society that they grew up in but on both, for both are an integral aspect of each other.


It's worth realizing that the status quo of no matter what family, institution or nation does not like to assume its responsibility on failure and reducing somebody's suicide to a purely individualistic act relieves them from that responsibility. To state that the person in question was "crazy" and justify their death with that, simply "buffers" the truth: that everyone is directly and indirectly connected to that death, consciously or unconsciously responsible for it. But the same thing happens with murderers: everyone is responsible for the murderer although only the murderer committed the crime. 


It's also interesting to realize that we seem to become conscious of things as we develop and that is how it should be. We, human beings, cannot be more than we are just like an individual cannot be more than he is at a given moment in time even though the next day after an accident or some other shocking experience he or she might be a completely different being. That we become more conscious of the truth and our selves over time is simply the realization that we are in a process and that what we can know and understand today is only a glimpse of what future generations will know and understand. The Human "being" as a whole is also in its own process and the fact that one individual can understand more than the whole of humanity at a given moment in time does not mean that that individual is superior to the whole but that the whole has moved into a more conscious aspect of itself through that individual's life. All that is true only in as much as an intellectual understanding is being searched for. Consciousness is not a question of quantity. Where it rises does not mean it is disconnected just like flowers bloom in all parts of the world as an expression of life. It's very much like the colors of the rainbow: they don't exist without light.






  

Deliberate taking: the author, agency and suicide 

Katrina Jaworski 

Abstract 

In the essay, ‘What is an author?’, Michel Foucault (1984, pp. 118– 

119) contended that ‘the author does not precede the works’. If this is 

the case, then what happens when the notion of the author as never 

outside discourse is grafted to suicide? What happens when suicide – 

most commonly defined as a deliberate taking of one’s life – is read 

through the idea that the one who is doing the taking does not precede 

it? Does this not obliterate agency in suicide: the key ingredient 

necessary to marking the individual as the sole author of their death? I 

respond to these questions by first considering what Foucault’s 

contention might offer to understanding the constitution of agency in 

the act of suicide. I then draw on elements of Judith Butler’s work to 

consider a way of thinking of suicide that furthers Foucault’s 

contribution. I suggest that positioning suicide as already part of 

discourse does not undermine the individual as the author of death, or 

make the act of taking one’s life any less deliberate. I conclude with a 

comment on Foucault’s position on death being power’s limit, and 

what this might mean for understanding suicide. 

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Suicide is commonly understood as an explicitly individual choice and act. In this paper I will 

focus on suicide as an act that takes place in private. My aim is to render an understanding of 

the act of suicide as never outside discourse. If the act of suicide appears as outside discourse, 

it is because its intelligibility and authorship are already part of discourse. 

For explanatory purposes, a common understanding of suicide can be articulated as follows. 

The Australian Bureau of Statistics, for instance, defines suicide as ‘the deliberate taking of 

one’s life’ (2004, p. 3). In this manner, suicide is situated as an explicitly individual act where 

the individual, as the author of the act, is solely responsible for the act. At the centre of the 

act stands an individual to whom the decision to die belongs. As such, the deliberate choice 

decided by the agent appears to be determined largely by the activities of a disembodied 

mind, and the absent presence of a body which does the taking of life. The latter is not 

identified directly, even though it is the necessary site of activity. Yet suicide is an explicitly 

individual act not because a person is automatically responsible, but because they are hailed 

as being responsible. By having responsibility attributed to them, the individual is situated as 

the original source for the intention to suicide. At the same time, suicide is marked by a 

‘doing’, made apparent by the taking of life that expresses an outcome. It is unclear what the 

outcome will be, other than there must be one to signify the taking. What is made clear is that 

the intention behind the taking must be deliberate in order to have the outcome recognised as 

a suicide. 

What happens to understanding suicide as an explicitly individual choice and act, if, as 

Foucault (1984, pp. 118–119) contended, ‘the author does not precede the works’? How can 

someone be an author of their act of suicide if the one who is doing the taking does not 

precede it? Does this not obliterate agency and intention in suicide: the key ingredient 

necessary to marking the individual as the sole author of their death? My initial answer is a 

‘yes’ to all questions, not only because the individual does not come before the act, and 

thereby cannot be its author, but also because the individual, as the origin for the expression 

of the act, appears to be absent. 

My response can be substantiated by further drawing on Foucault’s position. For Foucault 

(1984), the individuality of the author is questionable. Foucault (p. 105) suggested that 

authors as individual writers – those who hold a priori status – have disappeared. Instead, 

what is left of the author is a name that serves to represent modes of being via particular 

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practices that ‘systematically form the objects of which they speak’ (Foucault 1972, p. 49). 

Thus, the author’s name projects the individual as a coherent source of expression to 

neutralise the normative yet contradictory workings of power relations in a way that their 

workings remain foiled (Foucault 1984, pp. 108, 113). In this sense, authors are never located 

outside discourse. If they are prediscursive, then this is only ‘if one admits that this 

prediscursive is still discursive, that is, that they do not specify a thought, or a consciousness, 

or a group of representations’ (Foucault 1972, p. 76). 

To graft Foucault’s line of thought to suicide, it would seem that the individual is less likely 

to be the sole author of their death. With this lack of authorship, it seems that the wilfulness 

to take one’s life deliberately is in doubt, since the individual as the source of expressing the 

act is suspended by something outside them. If a ‘taking’ is taking place in the act, then this 

taking does not belong to the individual and, presumably, the act of death is not theirs, nor the 

agency required to enable the deliberateness behind the act. To settle for this resolve, 

however, would be a mistake, since Foucault’s position can offer more to understanding the 

constitution of agency in the material act of suicide. To get there, I want to draw on elements 

of Butler’s work on performative and performativity, as it enables a more nuanced reading of 

suicide, through which it is possible to gain insight into the macro discursive mechanics of 

Foucault’s contribution to understanding the author and authorship. 

In her work on sex and gender, Butler (1990, p. 25) re-articulates Nietzsche’s view that there 

is no doer behind expressed deeds, as the doer and the deeds are constituted by expressions 

themselves, rather than the doer being the original source for constituting the expressions. In 

this sense, gender as performative is ‘a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory 

frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance’ of sex as the natural and original 

source of expressing gender rather than being a discursive effect like gender (Butler 1990, p. 

33). Butler builds on this position later by contending that performativity can be seen as a 

reiterative and citational practice through which discourses of sex and gender produce the 

effects they name. Gender is repeated and ritualised through actions that precede, constrain 

and exceed the doer, whether it is through particular bodily gestures, speaking or being hailed 

by bodies and actions of others (Butler 1993; 1997). The trick of power is to make the doer 

and the deed look like the deed belongs to the doer as the sole author of the deed. 

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Suicide can be read as performative in that it can be seen as a ‘doing’. Suicide has a 

performative representation – a set of repeated bodily acts. These produce the effect of the 

individual as being the author of taking their own life – as being deliberate in and through the 

taking. To draw heavily on Butler, suicide is constituted by the very expressions that are said 

to be its results. Across the surfaces of the suicided body suicide is produced and rendered 

visible by rituals that condition the deliberateness in the taking of one’s life. For the sake of 

clarity, I will situate these as a set of interrelated imagined ‘movie stills’, bearing in mind that 

these may or may not lead to particular outcomes. The taking of life by someone might 

consist of: a) thinking about suicide, b) imagining possible outcomes, c) writing a note, d) 

gaining access to specific means to do it, e) estimating what might be lethal, or perhaps what 

is a culturally and socially ‘appropriate’ method, f) planning the location of the act, g) 

performing the actual act, e.g. pulling the trigger or swallowing the pills, and h) awaiting the 

loss of consciousness unless it has already happened, providing no one has intervened. In 

other words, suicide materialises on the basis of these particular rituals and corporeal gestures 

that bring into existence the taking of one’s life. These gestures are bodily acts, already part 

of the activities of the mind, even if they appear disengaged from the mind. 

Yet suicide as performative does not rest with the individual alone. Whether someone lives or 

dies, different bodies of knowledge and their discursive sites of practice such as coronial 

inquest findings, medical autopsy reports and/or psychiatric assessments, become part of 

interpreting if the outcome is a suicide, and, in particular, if the individual was deliberate in 

their intentions. From another perspective, is the individual capable of taking their own life, 

without prior knowledge of something called ‘suicide’ – knowledge that in turn is shaped by 

experts, individual experiences and society at large? It is clear, for instance, that something 

other than the individual taking their life already exists. If this was not the case, then patterns 

of suicide, be it in relation to gender, age, race/ethnicity, sexuality, class, or suicide methods, 

could not be documented by the ABS (1994; 2004), or understood at a macro level. In this 

sense, suicide can be read as a reiterative and citational practice, made possible through 

norms, meanings, assumptions and knowledges identified within existing historical 

conditions and patterns, through which something about the act can be hailed and understood 

as a deliberate taking of one’s life. 

What then might we say of agency? If much of what constitutes the act resides outside the 

act, then how can the deliberate taking exist? The issue here, however, is not about 

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attempting to disavow the presence of agency in the act of suicide. Instead, my point is to say 

that agency has a layered history on which the deliberateness in the taking depends. What 

constitutes one’s authorship is dependent on something other than the individual without the 

act ceasing to belong to the individual’s choice to kill oneself. This is what makes the idea of 

deliberateness, and authorship, possible. One can take one’s life, and be deliberate about it, 

precisely because such a taking is shaped by repetitive conditions and prior takings, re- 

articulated when the taking occurs. Butler (2004a, p. 32) suggests that we come into the 

world on the condition that the social world is there, which means that we cannot be 

ourselves without being preceded and exceeded by something other than ourselves. To follow 

on, we cannot depart from this world, or at least try to, without something paving the way for 

the deliberate taking to take place – which for some leads to death. In this sense, it is possible 

to read suicide as relational – as never being outside discourse – without undermining the 

individual as the author of the act, or making the act of taking one’s life any less deliberate. 

In so doing, it might enable thinking about what conditions the deliberate in the taking, and 

the taking itself, who and what is part of the process of interpretation, and whose interests the 

interpretations serve. 

Foucault put forward the view that ‘death is power’s limit, the moment that escapes it’ (1978, 

p. 138). Butler disagrees with Foucault’s claim by arguing that ‘in the maintenance of death 

and of the dying, power is still at work and that death is and has its own discursive industry’ 

(1996, p. 71). In relation to suicide, death is not power’s limit, since norms, meanings and 

assumptions and the processes that are part of making sense of suicide will constitute 

knowledge of suicide before, during and after the act of taking one’s life. The fact that an 

understanding of suicide as an explicitly individual choice and act exists indicates that there 

is what can be referred to as an ‘afterlife of words’ (Butler 2005a, p. 29) – an afterlife that 

precedes and exceeds individual deaths and their authors. Dead or alive, it may not be 

possible to be free of operations of power, as a result of the effects such operations 

materialise. What might be possible, however, is that someone may no longer literally suffer 

from unbearable circumstances if they are no longer breathing. This, however, does not 

curtail the production of truths concerning their deaths, whether true or false. 

My position on understanding suicide as relational, and thereby as never outside power 

relations, raises a serious question: is it not possible to be completely free of power at least in 

death, especially if death for some becomes the means of resisting circumstances and 

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experiences deemed unbearable? I cannot answer this question here, other than to suggest that 

something about suicide’s intelligibility remains out of reach since the material act tends to 

take place in private. And so there may be a limit to the way power operates: a threshold 

enfolded by what is said and known of suicide and, importantly, what remains unsaid and 

silenced. To borrow from Agamben (1995; 2002), it might be useful to consider the 

possibility of a zone of indistinction, through which it is not possible to summon the exact 

truth about the act of taking one’s life, yet something of the truth about the act remains, 

caught between those who ‘have explanations for everything’, and those who ‘refuse to 

understand’, and instead generate explanations that offer so little to those who remain to 

grieve for, and remember, the dead (Agamben 2002, p. 13). Maybe then, as Foucault would 

have it, knowledge can become ‘a means of surviving by understanding’ (Foucault 1988, p. 

7). Guided by the heuristic tools offered in Foucault’s (1985; 1986), Butler’s (2000; 2004b; 

2005b) and Agamben’s (1995; 2002) works, perhaps this zone is what needs attention next to 

better understand the author, agency and suicide. 

Katrina Jaworski works as a research fellow in the Division of Health Sciences, University 

of South Australia. Her research interests include gender, bodies, death and dying, and 

suicide in particular. katrina.jaworski@unisa.edu.au 

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References 

Agamben, G 2002, Remnants of Auschwitz: the witness and the archive, trans. D Heller- 

Roazen, Zone Books, New York. 

Agamben, G 1995, Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, trans. D Heller-Roazen, 

Stanford University Press, Stanford, California. 

Australian Bureau of Statistics 2004, Suicides: recent trends, Australia 1993–2003, Cat. No. 

3309.0.55.001, Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra. 

Australian Bureau of Statistics 1994, Suicides, Australia 1982–1992, Cat. No. 3309.0, 

Australian Government Publishing Service, Canberra. 

Butler, J 2005a, ‘On never having learned how to live’, Differences, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 27–34. 

Butler, J 2005b, Giving an account of oneself, Fordham University Press, New York. 

Butler, J 2004a, Undoing gender, Routledge, London. 

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Butler, J 1997, Excitable speech, Routledge, New York. 

Butler, J 1996, ‘Sexual subversions’, in Feminist interpretations of Michel Foucault, ed. SJ 

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Butler, J 1993, Bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of ‘sex’, Routledge, London. 

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Foucault, M 1978, The history of sexuality, vol. 1, trans. R Hurley, Penguin Books, London.