ABSTRACT
Finally, in the Epilogue, the authors revisit the advantages of a neo-Durkheimean approach to suicide that attends to the temporal ways, rather than the classic a-temporal terms of reference, in which social morality informs the significance of popular representations of suicide media-events. Further, focusing on the commemorative practices that help maintain the social compact despite its occasional breakdowns, public suicide talk appears as a mechanism that not only exposes the moral breakdowns leading to suicide media-events but also provides the necessary social glue to mend them. Since the cases analyzed in this book may aptly be labeled “social murder” rather than “voluntary death,” the diachronic design of this research unravels historically contingent meanings of what social murder or social betrayal may entail. As an arena in which changing meaning-making systems are equally represented and created, the public sphere is conceived of as a cultural seismograph that provides an empirically grounded source for tracing the ways by which shame and shaming are emotionally debated and judged in relation to contingent moral breakdowns attributed to culturally memorable suicide media-events. In our final remarks, we also problematize a priori pathologizing explanations of suicide that silence local and macroscale interpretations of individual acts of self-annihilation. Although based on local periodization and contextual analysis, the comparative potential of our investigation is further theorized in relation to moral breakdowns in other modern, neoliberal societies undergoing similar large-scale processes of retracting governmentality and increasing technologically mediated forms of communication and exposure that radically modify the accountability and affect mediating and forging the social compact and the individuals subscribing to its ethos and rules.
