Comments on: Do You Intend to Die? (I)

By: Do You Intend to Die (Don’t Answer This Question)? « The Heart Is An Organ That Pump Blood

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:52:06 +0000

[...] …………..Supervalent Thought is posting a series of ruminations on suicide. My first (of many) experiences with suicide was my closest friend/codependant in college. He was so out of control that we once had to lock him in a weaponless closet until he calmed down. Later my brother’s closest friend – a kid who practically grew up in my house – offed himself. His family didn’t let us know. They were Asian and ashamed. An article in Wired Magazine tipped my brother off after the funeral. [...]

By: Do you intend to die (II)? « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought

Do you intend to die (II)? « . . . . . . . Supervalent Thought — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 18:01:21 +0000

[...] have been trying and it has been trying to write the second installment of this post, as it is difficult to couple the distance and transference necessary for this stage of [...]

By: Do You Intend to Die (Don’t Answer This Question)? - The Heart is an Organ that Pump Blood

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 16:17:56 +0000

[...] darknessatnoon on Apr.11, 2009, under ufuckery …………..Supervalent Thought is posting a series of ruminations on suicide. My first (of many) experiences with suicide was my [...]

By: Nilotpal

Nilotpal — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 02:04:15 +0000

Hello!
As someone who has struggled to understand ‘suicide’for some years now, I find the poles of ‘attachment-detachment’ rather useful. But then, the key question is; attachment to what and detachment to whither?
For instance, ‘shame’ certainly appears to be one of the few ‘universal’ affective antecedent for suicides. Yet, even within a small village where I did my fieldwork in India, I saw how the affective intensity of ‘shame’ was directly proportional to an individual claim of ‘status’. ‘shame’ detaches all of us,but not all ‘detached’ commit suicide.
I suspect a formulation like this could be useful; one often willingly dies for what precisely one has lived for, provided one accords it “absolute personal valuation”.
Thanks.

By: supervalentthought

supervalentthought — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:30:45 +0000

Hi all! Your questions are too hard (and I am trying both to write something else and to write part 2 of this post) but let me say a few things.
1. I think, Jordan, that you’re confusing being managerial with detaching. You’re overwhelmed, you manage; you become exhausted from being overwhelmed and if you’re lucky you can take a vacation from your compelled pseudosovereignty via many different forms of lateral agency (see “Slow Death”) or self-medication; and if you’re not lucky or just tapped out, you get depressed and perhaps admit defeat, stop trying. It’s not a matter of detaching to manage things, it’s a matter of managing things *to stay in the situation* and not detach (that’s one way of thinking, for example, about eating disorders, and other habits of affect management that become addictive).
2. This leads to Kandice’s questions about failure, loss, shame. Sedgwick argues that shame is an effect of a lost relation of reciprocity with the world. The failure to repeat a sustaining relation. But that’s not the only affective atmosphere that loss/failure generate surely. One thing that’s hard about this (eg too complex for a post-response) is adjudicating the relation between a sense of failure that signifies an ongoing relation (as in Sangeets’s thought that suicide is an effect of an excessive attachment to life, which I thought made sense even though I don’t think it’s quite right, except if you mean by “life” that life has to be shaped by optimism and if it can’t be then one preserves that notion of life by withdrawing from it)and a sense of failure that is affectively experienced as a turning away, a cutting off, a successful compartmentalization. Dissociation. Dissociation will be part of the next post. In any case, so much of what we experience as failure is organized by events, what Kandice would call a failed situation, but I think the definition of situation (see “Thinking about Feeling Historical”) is that you know you’re in one but it has no shape yet, which is why it’s an especially anxiogenic genre. So it cannot fail, if it is a situation. I think the suicide loses the sense of relief in form and feels doomed to a flood of ongoingness unstructured by events (an event could set it off, the unraveling, but there is no end in sight). So here we’re talking about a lost belief that one can have an impact on the world that produces a sustaining energy that makes it worth reentering again and again; what we’re talking about is a sense of too closeness and airlessness and noise that makes it hard to feel optimistic that one could leave and return. Suicide is a tantrum by post-infants with agency. I’m sitting on the floor and not moving. I had a student, Anil Ramayya, who hanged himself a few years ago, and his stories to me on the way down about how haunted he was by the departure of the gift of form have really shaped my thought here.

I had more to say, but this was a lot, so I’ll stop. But I loved what Kandice had to say about the proliferation of details as a kind of optimism, maybe in a kind of gift economy, inducing rhythms of return. I think that’s true, but I also think of three other things just off the top of my head: one, what Adam Phillips calls the proliferation of details before a breakthrough (for Freud); and then the ways people trying to transmit an intensity can pile on descriptors; and then what I also do, the catalog as a call-and-response style call for brainstorming…And then we return to the avalanche of details as a performance of a numbed state…

thanks, looking forward…

By: Kandice Chuh

Kandice Chuh — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 15:28:52 +0000

Hey: What’s the relationship among (a sense of) loss, and shame? This is an afterthought to my comment about failure, and generated by engaging Sedgwick in conversation with your post: when loss is differently experienced as having an impact of being rather than doing (the difference between shame and guilt), then in the former, there is no way to remain/be attached (to self)? And so, the proliferation of details as a way of trying to capture loss is a practice of reaffiliation? (Mirrored as a proliferation of questions, as in this post?!)

By: Bianca

Bianca — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:55:06 +0000

Wow. Your post forces that impossible question about conditions of agency; why does crisis push some people to break and others to break out? Or, maybe not even break-out, but at least become “lateral agents” (if I read that essay as intended). Please please please keep on with this work – it is so very important!

By: Jordan

Jordan — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:30:23 +0000

This post is immensely moving and beautiful. But I wonder whether that emotional reaction is in a way at odds with post itself.

If I understand correctly, “detachment” isn’t a failure of emotion (this dovetails with Sangeeta Ray’s lead question) but a condition for knowledge. Too much detail makes one disorganized; detaching from the conditions of disorganization allows one to find the pattern; finding the pattern is a defense mechanism that allows one to inhabit the impersonal position of someone whose relation to conditions is mediated by expertise.

My question is: To the extent that I feel pathos for this position, am I missing the point?

By: Kandice

Kandice — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 11:11:27 +0000

This is an extraordinary post. Difficult to respond to, not for lack of explanatory clarity, but for its, yes, affective force. And because it resonates strongly in biographical/familial terms for me. Mulled for a few days on what you’d written (unintentionally; just stayed with me), and the term failure kept floating up. Does failure have a psychic structure? I mean, it must, but I don’t know if it does in the critical literature, or what it looks like. But I’m thinking of narrative failure, and in that way, am returned to Althusser’s model of the desire-producing (and inducing) practices and effects of ideology. So, maybe it isn’t just that those who suicide cannot detach from their situations, but that their situations fail — because the ideological narratives cannot but fail? I don’t know that this leads anywhere…

By: Sangeeta Ray

Sangeeta Ray — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 20:06:07 +0000

Is detachment the dark side of attachment. Is death for those who choose to die (is suicide a choice?) an example of excessive attachment to life. They can’t live this life because its in excess. And for those who write about death is detachment necessary.
I think your writing is very explanatory and I love long sentences that actually make sense. I found this post both moving and its trajectory from details, Stowe, obituaries, and suicides a really affective/effective spiral. In short=– powerfully evocative.