At the Limits of Suicide: The Bad Timing of the Gift

ABSTRACT

No matter how hard we try to grasp it fully, something about suicide always remains out of reach or outside of knowledge, unspoken, shrouded by the privacy and singularity of the moment in which someone suicided. How do we, the living, respond to this secret, to this bad timing so to speak? How do we give voice to the unspoken, which ironically is bespoken and embodied the moment it comes to be? In this paper we respond to the secret of suicide by examining how poetry resonates through suicide’s bad timing. Our discussion orbits around four parts of one poem entitled, ‘Suicide Quartet in Four Voices’. Keeping company with thinkers such as Jan Zwicky, Jacques Derrida, Elizabeth Grosz, Emmanuel Levinas and Margaret Atwood, we analyse how the viscerality of the body and time constitute what comes across as beyond the limits of understanding suicide. We also examine the embodied thinking of poets whose work honours suicide’s bad timing. We argue that poetry bears witness to the gift of suicide – an ethical demand placed on the living to honour what is vulnerable and visceral in death as much as it is in life.

KEYWORDS:

• Suicide and ethics
• time
• body
• poetry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This article focuses on completed suicides only. Therefore, we are not taking into consideration a spectrum of experiences with suicide, namely, surviving attempted suicide. Wordlessness can apply to these experiences, but such a wordlessness or inexpressibility is qualitatively different from when death is final, and therefore deserves attention on its own. A dead body cannot explain suicide in the way a living body will.

2. There are approaches to suicide as a ‘process’, which considers a progression through time from thoughts to plans to actions (e.g. Deseinhammer et al. 2008). These, however, do not approach time as an explanatory concept.

3. Scholars such as Chua (2014) can also be credited with paying a substantial amount of attention to the body in the field of social anthropology. However, Chua (2014) does not analyse the dead body specifically throughout her work on suicide.

4. More recently, Chandler (2016) has extensively analysed the body in suicide’s cognate, self-injury. While Chandler’s (2016) in-depth analysis and theorisation is of paramount importance, her focus remains on the living and breathing bodies.

5. The term, the living, is obviously a broad term. It can refer to those family and friends who have to make sense of suicide on a personal level, and to those who possess ‘expert’ knowledge and are in charge of making sense of suicide at an institutional level. It can refer to researchers who often come face to face with unexplainable things about suicide. Our use of the broad term such as the living is deployed on purpose in an attempt to speak to a boarder audience without presuming that this audience understands or researches suicide in the same way as we do.

6. See Jaworski and Scott (2016).

7. Parts of the poem are based on real life events. Others are influenced by the second author’s reading of the first author’s book, The Gender of Suicide, and reflections on the topic by someone who is no stranger to writing poetry on suicide.

8. For an extensive discussion of the dead speaking through mediums such as poetry, see Colin Davis (2004) and Diana Fuss (2013).

9. We are making this point about aural imagination the poem invokes, because as Street (2017, 21) argues, ‘we have the capacity to make sounds within our imagination, as well as to interpret sounds heard externally.’

10. To date, two scholars have drawn on the concept of the gift to analyse suicide: Jocelyn Chua (2014) and Dariusz Gałasinski (2017). However, their use of the gift relies heavily on Mauss’ understanding of the gift in which there is a circular exchange economy. Derrida (1992, 24, original emphasis) himself was critical of Mauss’ view when he said: ‘One could go as far as to say that a work as monumental as Marcel Mauss’s The Gift speaks of everything but the gift: It deals with economy, exchange, contract…it speaks of raising the stakes, sacrifice, gift and counter-gift – in short, everything that in the thing itself impels the for and the annulment of the gift.’ In Derrida’s vein, the gift of suicide can only be possible when there is no ‘and’ because there is no exchange. This is not to say that there is only one way of analysing gift in suicide, with ours being the correct one. Rather, the analysis of gift depends on what is at stake in the analysis as a whole, and what kinds of questions are brought to the fore.

11. For a more extensive argument about the performativity of suicide, see Jaworski (2010a, 2010b, 2014).

12. As we have argued elsewhere, our proposition about suicide as an ethical gift goes against Levinas (1969) view of suicide, which viewed as absurd and selfish, because it marks the end of responsibility. See Jaworski and Scott (2016) for our response to this quandary and a subsequent reworking of it to crystallise our own thinking about ides of gift and ethics in suicide.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katrina Jaworski

Katrina Jaworski is a Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia. She primarily researches the agency of suicide, with a focus on gender, sexuality, youth, ethics and poetry. She also works on Rwandan genocide, the philosophy of dying bodies, trauma and the cultural politics of thinking.

Daniel G. Scott

Daniel G. Scott is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is also the 5th Artistic Director of the well-established poetry collective, Planet Earth Poetry (planetearthpoetry.com). Nowadays he spends most of his retirement writing and publishing his poetry, working with poets and running poetry workshops.