ABSTRACT
In recent years, a number of scholars, practitioners, and activists have come together under the banner of critical suicide studies to offer a critical response to the dominance of suicidology and its foundational assumptions. This chapter offers a genealogy of this field of enquiry and traces how suicidology's most foundational assumption, that suicide must be prevented, also manifests in critical suicide studies. While in suicidology suicide is positioned as the outcome of mental illness, in critical suicide studies, this has come to be replaced with a model in which suicide is the outcome of social and structural factors. Thus, the chapter argues, critical suicide studies is implicated in shaping the suicidal subject and the meaning of suicide in accordance with the prevention narrative and, in doing so, (inadvertently) contributes to the de-agentification of the suicidal subject. Using a Foucaultian and Butlerian notion of critique, this chapter asks what it means to be critical when the critical project replicates the very foundation of that which it set out to critique, and begins to elucidate the role of subjectivity in why suicide prevention is so pervasive, even as we attempt to imagine different ways of being in relation to suicide.
