The (Un)Making of Suicidal Modernity: Giddens' Account

Pascal Kuokuei Kao

doi:10.13189/sa.2017.050405

Abstract

This essay proposes to recover the political site of suicide that has been displaced by a reflexive turn of sociology since the 1980s. Considering Giddens' social theory to be an example of such displacement, we argue that his early analysis of suicide is a vanishing mediator of his late discourses on society and modernity. Giddens coined a unique type called attempted suicide to invert Durkheim's typology before forging a secret link between suicide and agency. In so doing, Giddens' own recursive construction of society transferred to the reflexive regulation of modernity, thus tacitly admitting that routine structures have been destabilized into runaway systems. When Giddens advanced his life politics of intimacy and climate change, suicidal agency even became a strategy of survival. In conclusion, although taking modernity to the reflexive limit of individualization, Giddens did not break with the philosophical reasoning of the subject and the sociological reality of the social.

Highlights

The current of suicide has been unable to stop changing ever since it crossed paths with the storm called modernity
Intellectual history demonstrates that just as individual acts of suicide emerged to represent a social object at the expense of philosophical truth by the end of the 19th century, so collective forms of suicide retreated to herald a political event after the demise of sociological law in the beginning of the 21st century
Joining Nietzsche and Freud, Durkheim launched a Copernican revolution against philosophy itself insofar as his socio-structural typology of suicide exposed the myth of voluntary death that had underlain the metaphysics of free will from Seneca to Kant

Summary

Introduction

The current of suicide has been unable to stop changing ever since it crossed paths with the storm called modernity. Intellectual history demonstrates that just as individual acts of suicide emerged to represent a social object at the expense of philosophical truth by the end of the 19th century, so collective forms of suicide retreated to herald a political event after the demise of sociological law in the beginning of the 21st century. Disagreement aside, one common critique asserts that individual agency in Giddens’ modern society is conducted by the principal faculty of cognition To rectify this bias, much work has been performed to explicate the agency of an actual individual by stepping outside the bounds of cognitivism and exploring additional steering mechanisms, such as embodied technique, emotional culture, self-help practices and psychic identity [25-30]. We withhold judgment and a proposal before we identify the imagination of suicide that is embedded in Giddens’ flowing image of social reality We argue that his reflexive sociology represents an inversion of Durkheim’s structural-functional sociology. After the fourfold typology was reduced to a singular type called attempted suicide, our sociologist went beyond his peers to foresee that the trial of suicide would be regarded as a special type of agency, propelling society into the orbit of reflexive modernization

Attempted Suicide

How Is Life Politics Suicidal?

Conclusions