ABSTRACT
Mobilising somatechnics as a critical orientation at the nexus of Foucault's and Butler's work on power, subjectivity, and agency, this chapter begins the task of exploring the conditions of possibility of the suicidal subject. It explains how the imperative of prevention in suicide is sustained through embodiment practices that annul the agency of the suicidal person. Specifically, the chapter argues that in the context of suicide, the agentic subject only comes into being insofar as they cite the regulatory norm of wanting to live. It is through citing this norm that one attains a subject position from which one can be acknowledged as capable of making choices. However, the moment this citation stops, one's agency ceases to be recognised: the suicidal person ceases to be a suicidal subject, and is rendered intelligible as a mentally ill, vulnerable, at-risk, or risky subject, each of which are subject positions whose agency cannot be acknowledged. These subject positions, in turn, sustain prevention as the best response to suicide.
