2 responses to “Suicide and Work -Cederström & Fleming”
Unlearning life could be the dangerous project of Laing and Cooper, the original antipsychiatrists. The former talked about undergoing voyages into madness with someone on hand who had already undertaken that journey on hand to guide one back. The reversal of the psychiatrist and the schizophrenic, I feel like Laing- who dropped prodigious amounts of psychoactives and who struggled with depression and alcoholism- envied the wandering away from life, the deterritorializations of the existential territories, that the schizophrenics enacted. Guattari’s criticism would be that Laing’s problem was that he brought the schizo back into the everyday, returning it to the personological structures of Oedipalised subjectivity precisely through the familialist set-ups of the various Philadelphia Association mad-houses. We might prefer to say that Guattari, weirdly for one who worked with schizophrenics, overly romanticised the schizo flow. On the other side, Cooper, who really did go mad, as he reports it at least, who saw madness as both the expression of a need for autonomous subjectivity and its frustration. Still, for him, who seems to have read Deleuze and Guattari at least a little and to have modified their terms, the experience of madness was a decomposition of the ordinary bourgeois arrangement of subjectivity that allowed for the recomposition of it elsewhere on the other side.
How does that track onto suicide? Firstly it might be through the re-appropriation of the experience. Suicide isn’t depression and no one should think it is. They might come together but there is no necessity to it. Suicide isn’t then a loss of ability to communicate. It doesn’t constitute a ‘closed world’ (Al Alvarez) nor is it prepared like a work of art secretly in the heart of the individual (Camus). To learn how to die as learning how to live is a practice. And perhaps it is here that the quasi-Shamanic figure of the Laingian guide is best posited. Perhaps the best people to teach us about life are the survivors, those who have attempted, who have lived both the abject senselessness of the world, and who have returned from that grim escapology, who can tell the rest of us the value of a summer’s day, or what a “safer space” for someone in crisis would really look like. Perhaps if the people who have attempted but not completed suicide could take their right to speak about suicide we would understand it better and its temptations could be of use.
for me to have done something, and or to be skilled at something, is not the same as being aware of it in ways that could translate to other people or even necessarily to be able repeat it oneself, also don’t like the idea that how-to-live/meaning/etc can be generalized. But yes there is a great deal of need for more in the way of something like phenomenological case-studies in extreme circumstances and not just more normalization. So yes to more detail/thickness and no to more pseudo-scientific generalizations lets drop the socio-logical.
synthetic zerØ 
Unlearning life could be the dangerous project of Laing and Cooper, the original antipsychiatrists. The former talked about undergoing voyages into madness with someone on hand who had already undertaken that journey on hand to guide one back. The reversal of the psychiatrist and the schizophrenic, I feel like Laing- who dropped prodigious amounts of psychoactives and who struggled with depression and alcoholism- envied the wandering away from life, the deterritorializations of the existential territories, that the schizophrenics enacted. Guattari’s criticism would be that Laing’s problem was that he brought the schizo back into the everyday, returning it to the personological structures of Oedipalised subjectivity precisely through the familialist set-ups of the various Philadelphia Association mad-houses. We might prefer to say that Guattari, weirdly for one who worked with schizophrenics, overly romanticised the schizo flow. On the other side, Cooper, who really did go mad, as he reports it at least, who saw madness as both the expression of a need for autonomous subjectivity and its frustration. Still, for him, who seems to have read Deleuze and Guattari at least a little and to have modified their terms, the experience of madness was a decomposition of the ordinary bourgeois arrangement of subjectivity that allowed for the recomposition of it elsewhere on the other side.
How does that track onto suicide? Firstly it might be through the re-appropriation of the experience. Suicide isn’t depression and no one should think it is. They might come together but there is no necessity to it. Suicide isn’t then a loss of ability to communicate. It doesn’t constitute a ‘closed world’ (Al Alvarez) nor is it prepared like a work of art secretly in the heart of the individual (Camus). To learn how to die as learning how to live is a practice. And perhaps it is here that the quasi-Shamanic figure of the Laingian guide is best posited. Perhaps the best people to teach us about life are the survivors, those who have attempted, who have lived both the abject senselessness of the world, and who have returned from that grim escapology, who can tell the rest of us the value of a summer’s day, or what a “safer space” for someone in crisis would really look like. Perhaps if the people who have attempted but not completed suicide could take their right to speak about suicide we would understand it better and its temptations could be of use.
for me to have done something, and or to be skilled at something, is not the same as being aware of it in ways that could translate to other people or even necessarily to be able repeat it oneself, also don’t like the idea that how-to-live/meaning/etc can be generalized. But yes there is a great deal of need for more in the way of something like phenomenological case-studies in extreme circumstances and not just more normalization. So yes to more detail/thickness and no to more pseudo-scientific generalizations lets drop the socio-logical.