![\"Notes](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/Critchley-Suicide.jpg\")
<\/p>\nBy Cal Revely-Calder.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Simon Critchley, Notes on Suicide <\/i>(Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015)<\/p>\n
There are concepts that hang like icebergs within a writer’s prose, the surfaces covered by thin, quick words, and the greater bulk of the thought still hidden below. Simplicity is one such concept: skimmed down to \u2018simply’, it’s a classic example of an adverb saying a lot but telling little; when a writer claims that something is \u2018simply’ the case \u2013 and any writer might \u2013 it’s worth slowing up to question whether simplicity’s ever as simple as it seems. The trick is to grasp this doubleness of scale, inhabit it, and be aware of the fissures that always develop between the ideal and the practical compromise. Listen to the note of humility that opens Simon Critchley’s moving \u201clittle treatise”, Notes on Suicide<\/i>:<\/p>\n Suicide, in my view, is neither a legal nor moral offence, and should not be seen as such. My intention here is to simply try to understand the phenomenon, the act itself, what precedes it and what follows.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u201cTo simply try to understand”: a phrase that dirties its own euphony as it works its way around the broad savannahs of thought mapped by such miniature words: \u201csimply”, \u201ctry”, \u201cunderstand”. The problem, as Critchley knows well, is one of number, of knowing exactly what to focus upon, \u201cclosely, carefully, and perhaps a little coldly”, with his tolerant attention. Since Wittgenstein, in particular, we’ve been alert to the truth that concepts, as encountered in our languages and interactions, are inseparable from the way they’re lived; but \u2018suicide’ is a singular noun, an abstract phenomenon, and it’s so hard to believe that any one suicide (meaning the act? or, more archaically, the actor?) can be thought of as \u2018like’ another. (Quote marks again, out of hygiene and uncertainty \u2013 nothing better.) Every black sun is different, and each one leaves behind a different blackened earth.<\/p>\n Notes on Suicide<\/i> is restlessly motivated by this tension between the one and the many, and how suicide’s place in the world (here, mostly Western) has been shaped by its claims upon neither and both. The book opens by weaving an account of what \u201cwe” think into Critchley’s attempt to find a place for his \u201cI”-reflections. Often, as he admits, he’s been no more clued-up than anyone else touched by this topic \u2013 which is all of us, without exception or excuse \u2013 and that<\/p>\n it is still regarded as a failing that invites an embarrassed response. We think that suicide is sad or wrong, often without knowing why. And we don’t know what to say, other than mouth a few platitudes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Suicide is toxic to language. Actual moments of actual speech grow weaker and snap under the strain of words, thoughts, acts too heavy to bear. All we want is to stop talking.<\/p>\n We lack a language for speaking honestly about suicide because we find the topic so hard to think about, at once both deeply unpleasant and gruesomely compelling. […] It is as if our very proximity to suicide, the fact that our fate literally lies in our hands, is almost too much to bear, and words fail us.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n That \u201cus” could be anyone, may be everyone, because every forty seconds, according to the World Health Organisation, someone somewhere ends their own life. By current estimates, before 2020 that rate will have doubled. Critchley writes that suicide \u201csaddens the past and abolishes the future”. Again, singulars, plurals: \u201cthe future” is an abstraction, and too many futures are always being lost. This topic wastes words, none of which add up to what they need to say. He knows it, and admits he’s as prone to it as anyone, telling the story of a devastated friend confiding that someone deeply loved had killed themselves. \u201cI really wanted to help,” writes Critchley, and (like anyone) \u201cfound myself either asking dumb questions or uttering banalities”. And so, exiling himself to a hotel room in East Anglia, he faces the North Sea (an oddly stylised setting which appears again and again, \u201cbeating” and \u201cchurning”), and holds his tongue, trying to \u201cthink through the question of suicide in the only way I know how \u2013 in writing”.<\/p>\n So ends the introductory section of Notes on Suicide<\/i>, and its reflective mood, its determination to keep its feeling and expression grounded in the lived, the singular. And then comes the second part, which opens: \u201cWhy is suicide seen as illegal, immoral or irreligious?” Quick-stepping through the historical bases for outlawing the act, Critchley sets out the Christian arguments against it, and shows that they’ve never been free of some degree of inconsistency. He expands that into secular conceptions of the right-to-life, and reaches the same \u201cprovisional conclusion”:<\/p>\n …perhaps all talk of rights in relation to suicide is doomed to severe conceptual confusion, whether that right is deemed to be exerted by God, King, the sovereign state or the sovereign self.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This section is the longest, and it’s interesting enough, laying out a historical set-piece here and an intellectual lineage there. But in the end, it retrospectively seems paler, the only disappointment in Notes on Suicide<\/i>: it’s a Very Short Introduction left pinioned and struggling between the poles of exhaustiveness \u2013 show how all these arguments leak water \u2013 and dismissal, because of Critchley’s general reservations about the idea that reasoning it out will get anyone anywhere. Having stated on his opening page that \u201csuicide is neither a legal nor moral offence”, it seems odd that he spends his longest chapter patiently explaining why this is, and has always been, the case: at its best, the book is insistently personal, and he opened that first judgement with \u201cin my view”, so presumably he didn’t need to reason himself out of the prospect \u2013 at least, not by reason alone. He notes that \u201cto believe that suicide is a crime because life is sacred while also believing in the death penalty […] is a sheer contradiction”; only if you think people necessarily treat others as they do themselves. To hold simultaneous contradictory beliefs is something we evidently do all the time; it may be at the heart of being a person. Whatever its position on the side of a given moral line, there’s little to be learnt about suicide by thinking first of its historical status, its condemnation. Everyone living is at risk. It doesn’t belong to cultural time any more than death in general; this isn’t how those left behind will experience it. Critchley writes with sobriety that \u201cto be human is to have the capacity, at each and every moment, of killing oneself”, and what’s immeasurably heavy about that truth is its application to every past, present and future life. But it gives the lie to his measured dissection of cod phrases like \u201clife is a gift”, because such a phrase is (of course) disputable as a proposition, but any human saying it to another may well mean it as several other things: an expression of love, a tentative test of feeling \u2014 an embarrassed and restrained way of begging someone not to break your heart by ending it all. Critchley’s pr \u00e9cis<\/i> of Western thought isn’t wrong; it just feels beside the point in an elegant book so determined to abandon itself to the difficulty of grasping an act beyond the conception of those left in its wake \u2013 an act which nevertheless will leave their world in ruins.<\/p>\n The clue to this section may lie in what follows Critchley’s text, which fills only four-fifths of his book. The remainder is by David Hume, whose essay \u2018On Suicide’ constitutes the Afterword: a curious cameo, as if he were a friend whose voice had played a counterpoint during Notes on Suicide<\/i>‘s gestation. But Hume’s essay might be giving Critchley the wrong kind of support; at best, it’s only convincing in a very particular way. Hume puts a lot of stress upon the notion of what’s \u2018criminal’, transgressive, and shows clearly enough that, again, there are no consistent and complete frameworks within which suicide seems entirely off-limits \u2013 and so \u201cthat action may be free from every imputation of guilt or blame”. The sentiments are worthy, but read alongside Notes on Suicide<\/i>, this sounds like a heroically-sustained category error. It would be like exhaustively detailing the reasons why you can’t condemn extramarital affairs in every instance, under all possible circumstances; your spouse won’t be any more impressed. \u2018On Suicide’ is a clever little cradle of reason, for which Critchley has a lot of respect, but which he then goes on to transcend; in the end, he doesn’t imagine that rhetoric can fashion a route across this immense subject, instead showing that the problem is deeper within the individual \u2013 bridges can’t cure a horror of water. As he says, \u201cthe question of rationality with respect to suicide is severely complicated […] Rationality is usually combined with severe depression, which causes havoc with one’s reason.” The act of suicide, then, being at once somewhere beyond both rationality and its conspicuous lack, doesn’t lend itself to the kind of writing that builds its thought out of verbal Lego-blocks, like Hume’s: \u201cIf Suicide be criminal, it must be a transgression of our duty, either to God, our neighbour, or ourselves.” Well, maybe it isn’t, then; and so? Critchley admits early on that though he’s a professional philosopher (my shorthand), for him \u201cthe question of suicide is not really or even remotely an academic issue”. What he means is sobering and clear enough \u2013 he explains that throughout 2014 he was \u201cgenuinely struggling with thoughts of suicide” \u2013 and one of the great strengths of the rest of Notes on Suicide<\/i> is its willingness to fail precisely by philosophising, setting out the pros and cons and eventually abandoning them to end in a series of poignant questions:<\/p>\n Why not calm down and enjoy the world’s melancholy spectacle that spreads out so capaciously and delightfully before us? Why not linger a while in the face of what Nietzsche calls \u201cstrict, hard factuality”? Why not try and turn our selves inside out, away from the finally hateful inward suffering, and outwards and upwards towards others, not in the name of some right or duty, but out of love? Each of us has the power to kill ourselves, but why not choose instead to give oneself to another or others in an act of love, that is, to give what one does not have and to receive that over which one has no power?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is sensitive, wise, alive to Simon Jarvis’ canny warning that \u201cwith a rhetorical question there is always the risk that the reader may give the wrong answer”. Critchley could be answered with positives or negatives, according to each new reader in each new life. It’s the sort of reasoned elegance that makes David Hume’s afterwords seem ironically unreasonable; Hume might be correct in writing, a little superciliously:<\/p>\n It would be easy to prove, that Suicide is as lawful under the Christian dispensation as it was to the heathens. There is not a single text of scripture which prohibits it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n \u2013 \u201cmight” be correct: plenty of theologians would dispute the point. But, in any case, it’s a point about Christian doctrine. In the face of what someone on the brink is feeling, trying to express \u2013 Christian or otherwise \u2013 this wit and skill is just silk in the wind.<\/p>\n Sensing something amiss in all this craft, Critchley steps back \u2013 \u201cTruly, one has to be inside such a mental state in order to understand it” \u2013 and begins an exploration of the suicide note, that \u201clast and usually desperate attempt to communicate”. Again, these notes aren’t considered as societal or cultural phenomena, so much as personal exchanges of something too large to exchange:<\/p>\n They are […] failed attempts in the sense that the writer is communicating a failure to communicate, expressing the desire to give up in one last attempt at expression. The suicidal person does not die alone, but wants to die with another or others, to whom the note is addressed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This time Critchley covers the history in a few sentences, and anchors his meditations in the present. He sets up a \u201csuicide note creative writing workshop” as part of his \u2018School of Death’ art-installation in New York. (This, as he puts it, was \u201ca rather shy and admittedly smart-alecky reaction” to London’s \u2018School of Life’, and its self-help for the bourgeois fretful.) He’s attentive to the violently tender sharing that suicide notes demand; he opens his discussion by noting how the act corrodes other lives, never the actor’s alone:<\/p>\n …the desire to keep the details of suicide secret is questionable. As everyone knows, the Golden Gate Bridge is a popular suicide destination. Yet all the suicides jump from the side of the bridge that faces San Francisco. No one wants to jump from the side that faces out to the Pacific Ocean. Peculiar, no? It is, unless one accepts that suicide is very often a public act, an act of publicity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Though most suicide notes are personal documents torn between love and its betrayal, some are proudly public in the fullest sense. Critchley tells sad stories of those who die after writing what are, in effect, open letters: a Saigon teacher who self-immolates over the Vietnam War; an American husband broken by worsening tax affairs; most recently, Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street-merchant who \u201cimmolated himself because of police harassment and ignited the conflagration called the Arab Spring”. (A rare moment when Critchley’s style becomes slightly oversanguine, and \u2013 with that riff on fire \u2013 a little too assured for its own good.) Again, remember that suicide rates are rising, without the slightest hint that the growth will abate. These endings will come again, and again, and again. We’re caught between devastation and inadequacy: something should change \u2013 must change \u2013 but what change to make? Suicide notes may be eloquent, but their expression is so often unanswerable in the wake of their authors’ final acts.<\/p>\n \u201cSuch testimony surpasses commentary.” The words break down. \u201cWe might learn something”, thinking upon these notes; but it’s difficult to know what that something will look like, or how to make good upon it. In the event, Critchley’s workshop is a success, in whatever sense that word can be fitting. Around fifteen people turn up in the rain; he gives a short talk and invites them to write their own notes. (What to call these? Practice notes? fictional? play? Knowingly \u2013 perhaps self-knowingly \u2013 Critchley never addresses their status.) A quarter of an hour goes by, and then the little white index cards are read aloud, by those who so wish. What then transpired, he relates, was \u201cgenuinely surprising…intensely moving”. Some notes were obstinately unserious, like the one by Jamieson Webster, Critchley’s wife:<\/p>\n Dear Simon, (As Critchley notes, tartly, she’s \u201ca psychoanalyst and therefore a specialist in ambivalence”.) Some were haunted by the competing lures of sunny wit and mordant honesty:<\/p>\n I am sorry, mostly to my dog. Love Lauren. P.S. Please don’t bury me in Los Angeles.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And some writers let go, abandoning themselves to the possibility (dream?) that this could be a real goodbye, the last thing they’d allow themselves to say to those they felt bound to embrace, and bound to leave. For instance:<\/p>\n When you inevitably discover those things I kept secret, let these not diminish the reality, nor the magnitude of my love for you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Another:<\/p>\n I am so filled with love it is still too much to bear. I cannot find my way. The world is all wrong and although I withstood the worst of it, I lost out.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n In the face of these testimonies, these fifteen-minute journeys to the bridge, Critchley has no commentary to add. He himself is unable to write a note. \u201cI tried repeatedly, but no words would come.”<\/p>\n The suicide notes invite compassion by touching what’s both singular and plural about the concept: \u2018suicide’, noun, an immeasurable group of individual events with which we forever try, and fail, to come to terms. It’s no surprise that these final messages, on the cusp of self-destruction, are suffused with the outward reach of (and for) emotional life. As Critchley puts it, \u201clove takes place in the subjunctive mood: it may be, it might be, would that it were the case. The logic of love is akin to the logic of grace”. And Notes on Suicide<\/i> gives itself to that precarious task of reaching out without knowing if anything will be given back; there’s hope, and hope alone, because \u201cthere can be no assurance that love will be reciprocated”. The notes recorded here are beautiful in a way it’s difficult to understand; but this delicate and sensitive book only aims \u201cto try to understand”, not to aspire to a goal beyond our ambit. We may gain something from the attempt \u2013 as we gain plenty from Critchley’s writing \u2013 but we can never gain everything, a complete sense of what suicide, to put it falteringly, means. To have this would require us to stand outside of life, to see it in the round. But we can’t, and that’s our curse \u2013 in the fullest sense, the condition of living a life. Notes on Suicide<\/i> shows us not how to understand, but how to realise what we don’t know, can never know, and what it is to deal with that awareness. Suicide damages the living, but lies beyond us: simultaneous, contradictory truths. To “understand” it would take someone with the vantage of God; someone bereft by what they saw and knew; freighted, perhaps, with a sadness they could never live to tell.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n ABOUT THE AUTHOR<\/strong> Notes on Suicide<\/i> is restlessly motivated by this tension between the one and the many, and how suicide’s place in the world (here, mostly Western) has been shaped by its claims upon neither and both. The book opens by weaving an account of what “we” think into Critchley’s attempt to find a place for his “I”-reflections. Often, as he admits, he’s been no more clued-up than anyone else touched by this topic \u2014 which is all of us, without exception or excuse.<\/p>\n Cal Revely-Calder<\/b> on Notes on Suicide<\/i> by Simon Critchley<\/b>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":76131,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76129\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBreak a leg, or all your legs. I better brake fast.
\nWith all my love-hate,
\nJamieson (who is about to drive us off a cliff)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Cal](\"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/cal-revely-calder.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
\nCal Revely-Calder<\/strong> works and writes in Cambridge. He co-edits the experimental poetry\/prose magazine Charlatan Works<\/i>, and is a contributing editor at the Cambridge Humanities Review<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"