Freedom and Suicide: A Genealogy of Suicide Regulation in New Zealand 1840–2000

In: Journal of historical sociology, Band 18, Heft 4, S. 430-456

Abstract

Abstract  Taking one's own life is a moral and political transgression: it is taboo. As suicide is a special death that has warranted a panoply of sanctions, inscriptions and taboos across many cultures (Retterstol, 1993), suicide has come to play a crucial part in the formulation of social order in many political philosophies, including liberalism. The task of this article is to outline ways in which this making of political order can unfold in a liberal political context. Taking New Zealand as a particularly powerful case study, the discussion cuts a genealogical track through cultural practices of suicide regulation to make the case for a different way of understanding the political place of suicide in liberalism. Conventionally given the role of litmus test for liberal freedom, cultural practices of suicide regulation in New Zealand are shown to inscribe and enact particular ways of being free. Relays between colonial, social and advanced liberal modes of calculation and the criminally suicidal, the suicidally mad and those at risk of suicide are all shown to install a mode of power worked through links, networks and alliances that "govern persons in accordance with freedom" (Rose, 1999: 12). This genealogy sets out to dis‐quieten the assumption that suicide is a litmus test for liberal freedom. It is better to think of New Zealand's attempts to regulate suicide as in the service of governing through freedom.