The Suicide as pleasure

A paradigmatic trouble

Abstract

The aim of this article is to explore a resignification of suicide in positive terms, associating it with pleasure and metamorphosis, as a political bid to change the current paradigm that links it exclusively to existential suffering and causality. We seek to critically analyze this paradigm of suicide based on the work of Sandra Baquedano, who presents and crystallizes suicide as the result of existential suffering. Instead, it is proposed to understand suicide, through the conceptualization of Al Alvarez, Michel Foucault and Emanuele Coccia, as a process of bodily metamorphosis and an ethical practice of aestheticization of existence that desacralizes the life-death opposition. In addition, the act of suicide is presented as a moment of pleasure that makes possible the explosion of bodily materiality and desubjectivation. This resignification seeks to destabilize the dominant discourses on suicide, opening a space to rethink our relationship with voluntary death beyond suffering, pathologization and meaninglessness, so that people can, by appropriating their death, also take hold of their life.