“Overexposures: Notes on Suicide and Photography” (original) (raw)

Suicide as a Sign of Modernity in (the Finnish) Suicide Discourse in the 19th Century

Not long after the birth of so-called “moral statistics” suicide became identified by the European suicide researchers as an unfortunate but natural by-product of modernisation and progress. Writers such as Enrico Morselli, who applied the Darwinian theory of evolution in his analysis, contented that the rising suicide rates were caused by the increasing struggle for existence. Many of the like-minded suicide researchers also saw the higher suicide rates in the Western countries as a proof of racial superiority of the people of European origin. Suicide had become of disease but also a sign and proof of modernity. However, this rather wide spread conception was not shared by all of who studied the suicide phenomenon in the European countries. Towards the end of the century, suicide began increasingly to be seen as a symptom of degeneration, and not as a sign of increasing mental or cultural sophistication. The second line of criticism towards the concept of “suicide as a sign of modernity” was expressed by a Finnish suicide research, F. W. Westerlund. In his study of Finnish suicide, published in 1900, he pointed out that suicide was far from being unheard of among non-Western cultures. Furthermore, he sensed a hint of self-gratification among the researchers who claimed rather unfoundedly that suicide was simply caused by the advancements of modernity. In a sense “a heroic suicide” of antiquity had been replaced by “a civilized suicide” by the writers who aimed at accentuating the cultural differences between the modernised Western nations and other cultures. In this representation I will discuss the conflicting interpretations given by the 19th century suicide researcher as they were faced with the increasing numbers of suicides in the societies going through different stages of modernisation.

The Uses of History in the Unmaking of Modern Suicide

… what different forms of rationality present as their necessary condition one can perfectly well do the history of, and recover the network of contingencies from which it has emerged; which does not mean however that these forms of rationality were irrational; it means that they rest on a base of human practice and of human history and since these things have been made, they can, provided one knows how they were made, be unmade.' 1

Review: A Sadly Trouble History: The Meanings of Suicide in the Modern Age

New Zealand Journal of History, 2010

Harry Maude would not have wanted his very private thoughts on the apprentice work of students, such as Caroline Ralston, publicized, but biographers sometimes do not share the sensibilities of their subjects. Munro's selection includes one living historian — Lal. This ...

The Work of Suicide in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Some notes towards (especially later in the essay) a study of a documentary-film of ethical interest on suicides from the San Francisco Bay Golden Gate Bridge. The questions that this documentary asks of us are not questions merely concerning the technologies, but are instead questions of thinking concerning embedded representation and the playspace that such new technological thinkings profer. The 'aim' of this essay is not to simply 'deplore' its "representational" strategies but to place them within their epistemic tele-technological horizon. This is not (if any is) a work of representation, but a work embedded within a network of profering-comportings. Documentary trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zwl-Pa\_QT0M And for a code-icological comparison here is a citizen journalism pre-coded equivalent (especially with the use of post-sync soundtrack, added back-at-base) and the symbolic taking-in of the telephoto-captured dying into a realm of the living-pictor-realistic strategies of what I would call "practsubsumption": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF1L\_qKH2sA

From Act to Fact: The Transformation of Suicide in Western Thought

• The article is about the moral debate over suicide, from Augustine to the present. It assesses critically the transformation of a humanistic debate into a scientifi c one. Among the fi gures who receive detailed attention are Augustine, Montaigne, Donne, Vol-taire, Rousseau, and Durkheim.

The curse and the gift of modernity in late nineteenth-century suicide discourse in Finland

Progress and pathology Medicine and culture in the nineteenth century, 2020

'In greater nations, where large numbers of people create complicated social situations, where one can ind plenty of riches, a lot of sufering, and high intelligence but also many degenerated individuals, the batle against self-murder can at times seem hopeless, and the onlooker is lead to believe it's all caused by grim determinism'. 1 his is how the Finnish physician Fredrik Wilhelm Westerlund (1844-1921) summarised the late nineteenth-century suicide discourse in April 1897. Observing the European debate on suicide from the northeastern corner of Europe, the geographical distance and especially socioeconomic remoteness between Finland and the leading countries of modernisation presented Westerlund with a bird's eye view of the burning question of the connection between suicide and industrialisation, urbanisation, and modern society. Westerlund, like his contemporaries, acknowledged that suicide-the most repugnant of sins for over a thousand years-was a disease brought about by progress, a dark stain that signiied a modern society. In this chapter, I explore how suicide as a sign of modernity was interpreted in a country where the material side of modernity-big cities and railroads-were rarely seen by the majority of the population. he relationship between suicide discourse and modernisation has been a recurring subject in the historiography of suicide since at least the 1980s. he historian Howard Kusher has described in his book Self-Destruction in the Promised Land and subsequent articles how 'the fear of modernity' was relected in how suicide was conceptualised in the

Historical Phenomenology: Understanding experiences of suicide and suicidality across time

In: Pompili, M., ed. Phenomenology of Suicide: Unlocking the Suicidal Mind. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 1-12, 2018

Different cultures at different moments in history have constructed suicide differently. That seems an obvious statement, and any book which offers up a history of the topic confirms the fact. For Ian Hacking, " [t]he meanings of suicide itself are so protean across time and space that it is not so clear that there is one thing, suicide " (2008 p1), and it is not so hard to agree that meanings, descriptions and representations change, but beyond these, are there non-contingent (ahistorical and acultural) features of suicide? Is there perhaps an unchanging experience of suicidality? Many modern theories implicitly suggest there is (for example, Edwin Shneidman's notion of psychache, and Thomas Joiner's constructs of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness, can be read as attempts to describe underlying universals in the experience of suicide). This chapter argues that theories, representations, and accounts of suicide are necessarily contingent on the contexts (cultural, historical, discursive) within which they arise, but that so too are the experiences of suicidal subjects. Historical phenomenological approaches are well placed to help illuminate these issues, and by casting light on the contingency and heterogeneity of not only representations but also experiences of suicide, assumptions implicit in contemporary ways of understanding suicide can be usefully called into question. How notions of personhood, subjectivity and agency, as well as experiences of emotions and feelings, change over time and the ways in which these contingent aspects of life might relate to experiences of suicidality are considered, and the implications for contemporary suicidology, both in terms of theory and practice, are discussed.

The Politics of Suicide: Historical Perspectives on Suicidology before Durkheim. An Introduction

Journal of Social History, 2013

Historically, suicide is a Western neologism. Unknown to Greco-Roman civilization, suicidium might as well have meant "swine-slaying" to a Latin speaker. 1 The warrior culture of Germanic successor states glorified heroic self-sacrifice, celebrated in medieval literature as chansons de geste. If St. Augustine condemned Donatism for actively promoting martyrdom during the persecutions, then in part for fear of its potential to rob the early Christian movement of much-needed membership. Medieval Christians unanimously reviled the desperate act of self-killing until Renaissance humanists and artists recalled the political defiance of Cato, Seneca and, most especially, Lucretia, the original struggle of republicanism with tyranny manifest in the dagger through her heart. With their novel emphasis on the modification of human behavior, religious reformers turned their attention to the human soul and the inner temptation to self-murder. It fell to the Enlightenment to turn the activity of self-killing into a subject for scientific analysis: Suicide. Suicide became a moral affliction that was to be attended to not just by the police, but also by physicians and, subsequently, mental health care professionals. As representatives of the state, they produced actionable bureaucratic data. In a scramble to establish its scientific credentials, the emergent discipline of social physics (later to become sociology) latched on to official reports as indicators of a modern social dilemma. Hence, suicidology was born. With the expressed goals of measuring human behavior and tackling practical social issues, the earliest practitioners of social physics identified and prioritized suicide as a dramatic, but potentially soluble public health problem. For social physicists, suicide manifested a moral malaise as sensational as perhaps no other human behavior. Aptly named, moral statistics became their primary analytical tool. Two pioneering criminologists, André-Michel Guerry (who analyzed criminal data for the Parisian justice administration) and the Belgian mathematician Adolphe Quételet laid the foundations for moral statistics by studying immoral behaviors in the 1820s, with suicide chief among them. Auguste Comte harnessed social physics into a strategic theory of historical development employed to ground notions of modernity. 2 The translator of Comte's Positive Philosophy (London, 1853), Harriet Martineau, subsequently wed his scientific positivism with the

Towards the aesthetics of self-termination (suicide)

STJ | Stellenbosch Theological Journal, 2021

To end one’s life (suicide) creates a lot of questions concerning the identity and eventual emotional and spiritual condition of the person. Within a more religious context, the intriguing question surfaces: When a committed believer commits suicide, will such a person still go to heaven? The ethical dilemma evolves around questions regarding right (good/liberation) and wrong (evil/damnation), heaven or hell. Instead of a moral approach, the article opts for an aesthetic approach within the framework of a tragic hermeneutics of self-termination. Instead of applying the notions of “suicide” or “self-killing,” the concept of self-termination is proposed. A theology of dereliction is designed to explain the basic assumption: In a Christian spiritual assessment of “suicide,” the question is not about the how of death and dying but on the being quality of the sufferer. In his forsakenness, the suffocating Christ reframed the ugliness of death into the beauty of dying and termination: Res...