Coda to Heroes--Suicide and Symbolism

[Disclaimer-- this is an old essay I wrote.   I have no particular attachment to the views presented in it and don't stand by the quality.  However, since I've been trying fruitlessly to write and raise awareness about ME/CFS and other things that are more relevant to my life, I figured a good strategy might be to repost some of the critical theory /pop relatedculure  essays that people liked a lot when I last posted thek, and then see if they'd read the rest of what I write]



The thing that ultimately saves the flesh from being ridiculous is the element of death that resides in the healthy, vigorous body; it is this, I realized, that sustains the dignity of the flesh.  Yukio Mishima, Sun and Steel

Suicide is not only a pragmatic act but a narrative one.  Even its most pragmatic manifestations, such as euthanasia, are rife with symbolic meaning.

The manner of suicide, the timing of suicide, and the reason for suicide are all considerations.  Suicide is ubiquitous across demographics and cultures. There are an incredible diversity of reasons for suicide and many bio-political implications.

This is simply some preliminary notes on the symbolism of suicide.  I am too tired these days to write or read at length, but will hopefully be able to update this in more detail in the future, as it is an important topic.  I was partially inspired to write it by reading "Heroes" by Franco Berardi, although much of my interest in the topic goes beyond that frame.

Honor suicide is one of the most ubiquitous formalizations of suicide as ritual.  It is often done as a form of atonement, but also as a way to avoid living with shame.  Shame is not simply guilt, but is an aesthetic detractor from one's representation. While aesthetics are bound up intractably in politics and in every aspect of life, honor suicide seems to be more of a phenomenon in traditional societies that aestheticize every aspect of life than in modernized societies, although modern suicides often have overtones of the aesthetic aspect of honor suicide.  Rather than go into the history of honor suicide in detail, I am interesting in exploring the echoes of this ancient phenomenon in modernity.

Honor suicide is done to save one's honor, which is an aestheticized aspect of morality.  In this context "honor" has theological and aesthetic undertones, and is opposed to a utilitarian ethical point of view.  There is no pragmatic reason to commit honor suicide, there are only aesthetic reasons to. "Saving face" is essentially a homology for "saving one's honor".  The particular word choice of this expression indicates that honor is aesthetic, as it is a mask or "face" one presents to the world. Honor suicide is a form of mercy killing in which the mercy is a kind of narrative mercy--putting a period on a sentence before it turns into a run-on sentence, or ending a narrative before it is sullied by listlessness and aesthetic weaknesses.

Yukio Mishima, a modernist Japanese writer, performed seppuku after he failed to convince the military to go along with his coup and restore imperial rule in Japan.  In his non-fiction writing, such as "Sun and Steel" he discussed discipline as an aesthetic force and the intoxicating aspects of ritual, and was concerned with living his life as art in a way that combined the modern and the traditional.

While modernity has sometimes been understood as a total schism with earlier aspects of tradition and the Sacred, such as "sacred time" and "sacred space," aspects of the Sacred and enchantment still permeate modernity.  "The Spectacle" is one term for a theological totality that is an emergent property of capitalist modernity, and cannibalizes and reconstitutes aspects of the Sacred. Popular culture iconography, its apotheosis in the ubiquitous Image that has a life above and beyond the subject of the image, is a large part of this Spectacle.

The most famous suicide in American history is Kurt Cobain's.  As Mark Fisher has noted in "Capitalist Realism," Cobain's suicide marked the "...end of rock's Promethean ambitions".  Cobain's suicide was intertextual with American pop culture/rock iconography. He famously quoted Neil Young's lyric "it's better to burn out/than to fade away" in his suicide note.  He cemented his status as an icon via his suicide, whether unwittingly or not. Rock and roll history has been experienced as a titanic dionysian drama before our current era, but is probably now superseded by a kind of cultural life that is without narrative, and in which drama is not a narrative quality but is reduced to a quantity--an intensity, which correlates with the overloading of the body and affective body with information.  Excuse my tangent, but the preceding paragraph is context for why Cobain's suicide is worth examining in the context of the Sacred and the Profane.

Any traditionalist detractor of Cobain (or of this post) would probably dismiss the idea that his suicide was analogous to honor suicide for many reasons.  One, it wasn't part of any formal ritual, and it lacked the discipline and stoicism of those rituals, being a quick shotgun blast to the head. Secondly, they would probably argue that he did it not to save face, but because he didn't want to deal with the rightful duties of his life--fatherhood, artistic production, his marriage, or because he was a depressed junkie.  These arguments would only hold up if I claimed Cobain's suicide to be homologous to seppuku or any form of honor suicide, but I only argue that it is somewhat analogous, and that it is an example of an echo of traditional religious form reconstituted in modernity.

Mircea Eliade argued that aspects of the Sacred were bound to be experienced or reconstituted unknowingly even by secular detractors of the Sacred.  The death of God doesn't result in an absolute atheistic freedom from the trappings of religion but instead in a subconscious remapping of the world--a reterritorialization of once secular spaces as religious, mapped via various affects and affinities.  Cobain's death and life can then be discussed in theological or mystical terms.

An account of the last months and weeks of Cobain's life makes it clear that he was a fundamentally sincere person that was consumed by Spectacle, by Moloch, by the music industry and even unknowingly by the fans and their expectations.  He was ill, physically and mentally, and had given a lot while not getting back what he wanted--even if he had capital, he was not fundamentally satisfied. His suicide note betrays that he was tortured by how much playing shows had become a chore to him, and how he didn't want to keep his persona and life going once its narrative had become hackneyed and grating (at least by his exacting standards).  This is analogous to a traditional honor suicide--just from the standpoint of an artist rather than a warrior.

Suicide--especially but not only physician-assisted suicide--in the case of chronic illness is symbolically complicated and is related to honor suicide but also to more problematic biopolitical mythologies such as those that animate eugenics movements and euthanasia.  I find euthanasia troubling not because I don't believe in giving people the agency to end their life with dignity (I absolutely do, and may do so myself), but because it is situated within a biopolitical realm in which death is made clinical and is granted only when the State permits it.  Lethal injection replacing earlier forms of execution is part of this attempt to make death a medicalized experience, despite the fact that lethal injection is often botched due to various factors, including the use of untrained, incompetent people to administer it (doctors refuse b/c of the Hippocratic Oath), the use of drugs that don't sufficiency render unconsciousness or death quickly, and the unavailability of earlier, more effective drugs.

While I find euthanasia and medicalized forms of suicide troubling because of the associations with medicalization and biopower, they also seem necessary as a defense against the biopolitical aspects of medical technology.  As medical technology extends under the purview of the State, life is increasingly able to be extended at the cost of quality-of-life and agency. Stories of people who survive suicide attempts or ODs because of quick medical intervention, but live with extreme brain damage and loss of their previous personality and vitality are extremely common.  Even legal protection against these horrors is difficult as EMTs are likely to ignore DNRs and err on the side of saving a life to avoid getting sued.

Suicide in the case of chronic illness, while it can fall into the tropes of the clinical, medicalized exit, can be a pushback against a regime of biopower that seeks to control what it deems "life" and therefore to extend it, at the cost of spirit and vitality.  It differs from "honor suicide" in some ways in that there are usually pragmatic factors, like the inability to tolerate immense pain or suffering any longer, but it is similar in some ways--in that it can be a way to "save face" or preserve one's dignity. Suicide is always a narrative act.

**Interesting note on the phrase "saving face"--a literal interpretation of this phrase could apply to the choice to shoot oneself in the chest rather than the head despite how much more certain a shot to the head is to kill (97% vs. 89.5%, according to "Lost all Hope" the internet's [or clearnet's] leading resource on advice on how to commit suicide effectively).  The symbolism of a gunshot to the head vs. chest is important. This essay could be way, way longer and discuss the similarities between car crashes and "blowing your brains out" and how Americans love quick explosive deaths, and how Elliott Smith essentially committed seppuku (jfc that must have hurt) but I'm really far too sick to be able to write in long form without taking a long-ass time.

Future installments of this series of posts may, if I have the energy to continue, include discussion of the suicides of Elliott Smith, Sylvia Plath, Guy Debord; discussions of mass murder as suicide, suicide bombing, physician-assisted suicide, suicide in the case of chronic illnesses, suicide because of love, the biopolitical ramifications of euthanasia, "does suicide send you to hell", etc...