Images of an impossible event

Abstract

The text puts into focus the changing nature, dramatic actuality and expanded (bio-ethical) meaning of the suicidal phenomenon as a global cultural and media symptom of the first decade of the 21st century. Starting from radical examples of a suicidal protest as a political deathritual (the nature of which is here conceived by victims' struggle for freedom, respect of human rights and emancipation of the oppressed working-class people), the analysis is supported by theoretical backgrounds among which the most remarkable place has been reserved for a study about the history of self-immolation by the British sociologist Michael Biggs. The text attempts to open up new fields of interpretation bordering the phenomenon of the image, on the one hand, and the phenomenon of suicide, on the other, in the context of contemporary everyday life and media culture under the globalization regime. One of the main goals, towards which this re-articulation of suicide as an ultimate cultural symptom of our times has developed, resides in the need to re-examine the complicity between the iconography of death (as a consequence of the radical self-destructive ritual) and the new imaginary of the 'political'.