Citation

Kuzner J. ELH 2014; 81(1): 61-81.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, Johns Hopkins University Press)

DOI

10.1353/elh.2014.0002

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

With focus on Donne's Biathanatos, this essay examines relationships between self-killing, the public sphere, and personal freedom in the seventeenth century and in the present. Specifically, the essay explores how debates about the ethics of self-killing--and about whether publics are competent to decide those ethics--open onto debates about the kind of freedom that public life is thought to confer. Numerous scholars describe the histories of self-killing and of the early modern public sphere with emphasis on enabling, empowering escapes from authoritarian overdetermination. This essay, by contrast, argues that Biathanatos defends a freedom--both to debate suicide publicly and to decide about suicide privately--that is vexing, not enabling, and that induces a hobbling, yet salutary epistemological humility.

Language: en