Michel Foucault's Simplest of Pleasures

 

Portrait by Rinaldo Hopf (2004)

Michel Foucault was always deeply attracted to the idea of suicide as one he could darkly caress and think of primarily as an aesthetic question, rather than as a moral problem. He encouraged everyone to carefully choose and prepare their own death: to arrange the details and shape it into a work of art.

Of course, he appreciated the fact that suicide doesn't always result in a beautiful corpse and there are often discouraging traces left behind. It's obviously not very nice to have to hang yourself in the kitchen and leave a blue tongue sticking out of your mouth; or to jump from your eighth floor apartment and leave tiny bits of brain on the pavement for the local dogs to sniff at. Having said that, much of this unpleasantness could be avoided if we revalued suicide and made it easier and acceptable to kill oneself. 

In an interview entitled The Simplest of Pleasures, Foucault envisions a time and a people to come who have accorded suicide the highest status. Such people will hold suicide festivals and suicide orgies and establish places where those planning on suicide can seek out potential partners.

Indeed, Foucault says if he were to win a fortune in the lottery, he would personally open a suicide hotel where people who wanted to die could go and spend a weekend, enjoying themselves as far as possible before happily checking-out, liberated of every identity.

To think of suicide in this manner - as a question of style and as something not only admirable, but chic and playful - dissolves the depressing interiority that those who would make of life and death a tedious psychodrama insist upon. Death should not be another opportunity to pass judgement; nor should it be turned into a banal biological fact with which to smother the imagination. 

And suicide should not be left to a minority of unhappy souls who frequently make a mess of it and thereby bring the entire concept into disrepute. Each one of us needs to address the issue of how best to make an exit from this life - not waste time asking why it has to happen, or praying there's an afterlife.