ABSTRACT
Dominant approaches to suicide predominantly focus on suicide and the suicidal person: suicide prevention requires intervention in the lives of those who want to die and have died by those who are committed to living and longevity. Conversely, this chapter shifts the focus away from the suicidal person and highlights the “where” from which suicide is read. It argues that dominant approaches to suicide take for granted that the desire to live and the subject that wants to live are pre-discursive, and highlights that the desire to live is no more or less natural than the desire to die. Through analysis of cultural texts such as documentary, media guidelines for reporting suicide, and suicide survival memoirs, and working with concepts such as orientations, perception, and the logic of life, this chapter enquires into the somatechnics that sustain conceptions of life and the desire to live and for longevity as “natural,” and how they are implicated in administering which speaking positions in relation to suicide are validated and whose stories are heard in the wider culture. Thus, the chapter shows that if the positionality of the living disappears in its presumed neutrality, the normative character of the responses to suicide it enables and the subjectivities it shapes and is shaped by is displaced from view.
