ABSTRACT
On 11 August 2014, Robin Williams hanged himself in his California home. The news of his suicide was met with shock, and his death was widely publicised in news media internationally. News media and the public alike were interested in finding the cause of Williams’ suicide. Over time, this cause was variously identified as depression, a lack of belonging, disconnection, the heart surgery he underwent, his history of alcohol and drug use, side effects of the medications he took for Parkinson's disease, his age, and Lewy body dementia. In each of these explanations, Williams himself remains entirely absent. The Impossible Subject of Suicide begins with a survey of the news coverage of Williams’ death to illustrate the core themes of the book, that is, the elaborate machinery of techniques that is required to sustain prevention as the best and only ethical way to respond to suicide, which, in turn, positions the suicidal individual as inherently non-agentic, as an impossible subject.
