Message-ID: <alpine.NEB.2.20.1612301844440.1137@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.wvu.edu>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>
Subject: On Suicide in these times: Stay Alive! (sent to Fb etc.)
Date: Fri, 30 Dec 2016 18:47:16 -0500 (EST)
(apologies in advance - too much teetering death at the moment) On Suicide in these times: Stay Alive! http://www.alansondheim.org/vale.jpg 1. Beginning, which is a beginning of an end, of the end or endings of others, is difficult, is a problem; at the edge of one year, edge of another - at a simultaneous moment of withdrawal and forthcoming - there are too many tremblings, too much pain in evidence, already too many deaths (from suicide, from age; from accident; from anything) - which, in all the accountings of the year, are rarely mentioned here, in this whatever space, as if discussion were already going too far, too much of an admittance of the catastrophe upon us. So that it is well to reflect on what is about these things which are acts, deliberate or otherwise - what these conjure up, what cessation means in the face of philosophy (for philosophy and theory share a face) - not in order to salvage a life or lives (for these are choices one makes, and perhaps, as long as one is alive, one makes continuously)... Is cessation in fact the ruined sign of an end to fecundity, or an impoverished fecundity where breath itself hardly matters? Is it in fact the end of overwhelming struggle - against pain, against the turn of our body against us as we age or sicken or exhaust what little resources we have? Not having answer to these questions. Not having answers, but observing these questions, suicide itself, as a background to the discussion we have, perhaps as part - and parcel - of a political opposition we share - not only against a violent regime on the horizon of our country, but our consciousness itself - and not necessarily such a regime, but the internalized regime of the body, under duress, under or beneath pain, which we choose no longer to endure - or it chooses us - no longer unendurable - and then what? And then what? Death stalks the words and worlds we write; death lies within the punctuation of the sentence or the capital punctuation of a body irrevocably faltering. What battles we have fought among ourselves, among others, under the graze and gaze of others? The gaze of others as a prefiguration of our own gaze, our own transformation into the thing we may wish to eliminate, and painlessly, quietly, slipping away in the guise of sleep. For the sharpness of pain may reverse things, recommence a call towards life, a call from the living to the still-alive. How many of us, how many times, do we feel we would simply slip away, if given the chance to do this in the sense of a world peacefully and gradually dimming, before the harshness of yet another sunrise of regret? It becomes clear and clearer that nothing in the world is deeply susceptible to change for the 'better,' however defined - that the world lurches from crisis to crisis, that the inconceivable fragility of the good always collapses, sooner or later. And sooner or later, _now,_ as exponentials make themselves felt, exponentially, from population increase to desertifica- tion to militarization, to the harshness of rhetorics drawing inspiration from the closure of boundaries from the right. One assumes that one or another form of rationality, spiritual or otherwise, will ultimately heal, but the words of a strongman, regardless of their content, can wipe things away in an instant. In an instant! Yet we have our bodies to do with what we want, as long as we have control over their cessation. We have always already been living among the denouements of the world, of the thought of the world. The thought of the world recedes as suicide seems more and more of an option. The project may increasingly decathect; the heightening of values is also their evanescent flattening. The flattening of the signifier is also of course the loss of meaning; might one even ask what sort of meaning exists in the face of the firing squad or barrel bomb? Is it possible to inherit such meaning, from one body to another? Do suicide and murder share anything in common, beyond someone's death? History absolves nothing; there is nothing to learn from history except the useless paradox - that there is nothing to learn from history. From history to suicides, intentional deaths - as if discussion were going too far, just a pointer to a useful absurdity: it is a crime to kill oneself and a crime to attempt to kill oneself. And a solution: Let the crime be punished by a firing-squad, and the sooner the better! 2. Misery: There are as many causes of suicide as there are suicides, but misery, physical and psychological, seems almost, but not quite, fundamental. Physical misery in particular is relatively clean-cut: a way to eliminate chronic pain, to refuse the corporate-legalistic apparatus that insists on keeping the body alive at all costs. Psychological pain is all the more difficult, as it is entangled in personal and communal history, economic and other struggles; it escapes categorization. It is here that _thwarting,_ from without and within, is paramount; so many move from hope to hopelessness to hope, following one or another illusive goal, however well- or ill-defined - until the goals themselves become wasted, used-up, paste-like, stigmatized, exhausted (elsewhere I use the word "defuge" to indicate this state); this is the decathecting mentioned above, the effect of anaffect. Anaffect, think of collapse into the Kristevan chora, choked by symbolic debris, undercut by absence - holding-on to the emptiness of annihilation without the Buddhist grounding in dependent arising. So many deaths already. So many deaths to come. Already I am saying nothing new, only that suicide is part and parcel of the ground among us, within the corruption of ideality - that it seems almost never to be mentioned here, in any Foucauldian discursive formation we find undercut by an increasingly corrosive political, social, and medical climate - the body politic becoming the political body becoming the body itself. We are caught up, bootstrapped upon ourselves, with very little resource or recourse except the memory of theory, the memory of memory of action, of the province of the signifier, which we hope to revive, in order to find a place to stand to move the earth. It's well to look for this, a place perhaps of refuge or a place attempting to counteract violence of all sorts; it may also be well to believe that such a place no longer exists, or exists intermittently only under the aegis of being-human. And then to act, however one desires, to act accordingly, while one still has the chance: Please stay alive!