Making the Suicidal Subject Live

• In Event: Rethinking Challenges of Technology: AI, Algorithms, and Biopower

Abstract

As debates about extending the right to physician assisted aid in dying to mentally ill people grow in Canada and some European countries grow, and as awareness around youth mental health and suicide prevention have increased since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, I seek to conceptualize these seemingly contradictory impulses within a biopolitical framework. In this paper, I argue, that the advancement of new bio-technologies has forced the population into increasingly discrete sub-groups organized by race, wealth, health, ability, sexuality, etc., that proliferate and trouble the initial binary drawn between the Foucauldian categories of “make live” and “let die.” As human bodies at both the individual and population level become increasingly subject to the disciplines and controls of biopower, is it still possible to distinguish a discrete population marked as “let die”? If yes, who belongs to this category? In what ways do contemporary logics of biopower contribute to the casting of let die as the most benign form of death that one may experience and upon whom in this category is there a forced imperative to live? In this paper, I suggest a restructuring of the biopolitical categorizations of human populations that accounts for their murkiness in this present moment. Performing this restructuring is necessary within the broader discussions about medically-assisted aid-in-dying and youth suicidality, because it is the conditions of one’s living that define one’s control over their death, and because, puzzlingly, increased acceptance of medically-assisted aid-in-dying has further pathologized suicidality, more generally.

Author

• Alison Parks, Stetson University