Reflections on suicide: destabilizing a reductionist discursive construction

Abstract

This article questions the practices by which suicide is understood, which are inscribed primarily in the positivist camp of Psychiatry and Sociology from a Psychosocial point of view. We problematize the conventional notion of suicide by introducing subjectivity as an analytical and political category, and focussing on the processes of subjectivation, from a foucaultian perspective. The incorporation of the social dimension into the study of suicide, through the inclusion of its subjective and intersubjective dimensions, provides concepts that permit the reworking of questions about suicide. The new elements we introduce offer, we claim, a reconceptualisation of the conditions out of which people's capacity of action emerges. This kind of analysis can be extended to cover the different ways in which the death of mundane efforts (and desires) in daily life may be brought about.