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ABSTRACT
More than ever before it is clear that suicidology requires a serious re-thinking of its approach to understanding and responding to suicide. This is not simply because disciplines such as medicine, psychiatry and psychology dominate what counts as valid knowledge about suicide. Rather, a serious re-thinking is required because the philosophical roots of suicidology remain taken for granted. This article addresses such a philosophical quandary by arguing that we need to take two steps back before those of us working in critical suicidology proceed any further. I begin by surveying suicidology’s philosophical underpinnings. Drawing on the philosophical works of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Margarite La Caze, I then examine the role of ethics, and its relationship with two such unlikely ethical concepts – wonder and generosity. Finally, I consider what role such ethics might have in providing a new foundation for critical suicidology – a foundation that remains open to change, to difference and unconditional hospitality as means of responding to the painful agency of suicide and its significance in understanding what it means to be human.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. In this article, I use the phrase, critical suicidology, more often than critical suicide studies purely for historical reasons as the latter phrase was adopted officially since 2018 among scholars attending critical suicidology since 2016. The former phrase also signals the beginning stages of my own thinking on wonder and generosity in regard to how we understand suicide.
2. This dominant pattern continues eight years later (Hjelmeland and Knizek Citation2017).
3. See Battin (Citation2015) for an extensive discussion and analysis of the historical influence on interpreting suicide as immoral.
4. Gender is not the only example that can be used to explain the serious epistemic consequences of scientifically driven research in suicidology. Limited by space, I have chosen to focus on gender. Unfortunately, gender continues to be a problem in suicidology almost three decades following Range and Leach (Citation1998) article. For example, analysing article impact in suicidology, Andriessen, Krysinska, and Stack (Citation2015) found that male U.S authors make up the majority of papers published, especially in key journals such as Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior.
5. This is especially the case in relation to attributing a compulsory ontology of pathology in suicide, namely, that mental illness is always the cause of suicide, and suicide is always an individual problem (Marsh Citation2010).
6. I began rethinking the distinction between morality and ethics earlier in the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. For further details, see Jaworski (Citation2016).
7. See Jaworski (Citation2010a, Citation2010b, Citation2014, Citation2015). Unfortunately, I do not have any room here to critically unpack Foucault’s slippery use of agency and the body, which differs substantially from Butler’s (Citation1990, Citation1993, Citation2004) take on both of the terms.
8. Cultural patterns of suicide, be it in relation to gender, ethnicity and/or sexuality, are evidence of reiteration taking place.
9. Here I am mindful of the silence my colleague Daniel G. Scott and I discuss in an article in this issue.
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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.