Citation

Stavrianakis A. HAU J. Ethnogr. Theory 2016; 6(1): 163-188.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Centre for Ethnographic Theory SOAS, University of London)

DOI

10.14318/hau6.1.012

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

This article takes Durkheim's Le suicide as a conceptual testing ground for an ongoing field inquiry into assisted suicide in Switzerland. It tackles the question of the extent to which a Durkheimian approach to the social facticity of human practices can adequately grasp the ethico-pragmatic variation in which people give form to their lives, especially under heavily constrained circumstances. The article makes two interventions: it first draws out the conceptual significance of the asymmetry in the architecture of Le suicide, namely, of Durkheim's explicit refusal to elaborate a fourth type of suicide (fatalistic suicide). It then presents the blind spot, and asymmetry, as constitutive of his normative scientific posture: That social science, in its modern modalities, has the means to identify the normative ends toward which social life should aim, to the detriment of a more pluralist ethical and anthropological postulate through which to grasp and understand the multiplicity of moral forms pertaining to suicide, of which assisted suicide in Switzerland provides the test case. © Anthony Stavrianakis.

Language: en

Keywords

Durkheim; A death in Switzerland; Anthropology of ethics; Le suicide; Pragmatic social thought