TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2016//
TI  - Obstinacy and suicide: Rethinking durkheim's vices
JO  - HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
A1  - Stavrianakis, A.
SP  - 163
EP  - 188
VL  - 6
IS  - 1
N2  - 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.<p /> <p>Language: en</p>
LA  - en
SN  - 2049-1115
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.14318/hau6.1.012
ID  - ref1
ER  -