Epilogue

Summary

But then I understood that there was an exit and that I would only see happiness and joy there, ahead, on the edge of death.

Natal'ia Klimova, “Letter before Execution,” 1907

And we are not only, in Foucault's words, animals whose life as living beings is at issue in their politics, but also – inversely – citizens whose very politics is at issue in their natural body.

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1998

People have taken their own lives throughout human history. Suicide has consequently been regarded as an anthropological or social constant, even a defining component of our humanity. Yet this perspective represents a particularly modern approach to the phenomenon. The very notion of a common humanity (and hence universal human rights) is itself a modern one, for being has historically been qualified by a wide range of criteria: citizenship, caste, gender, estate, class, race, religion, and so forth. This propensity to universalize the human element within suicide obscures in turn both its historically distinctive meanings as well as the striking repetitions over time. Indeed, its valuation has fluctuated widely, not just its positive or negative judgment but also its relative importance. Suicide was an issue during the Enlightenment, for example, but only a marginal one; it was certainly not considered, as Albert Camus famously claimed, the one truly serious philosophical question.