On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death

by Jean Amery

Overview

" . . . a moving, deep series of insights into the suicide's world . . . " —Kirkus Reviews

Jean Améry (Auschwitz survivor and author of At the Mind's Limits) thought of On Suicide as a continuation of the kind of reflections on mortality he had laid down in On Aging. But here he probes further and more deeply into the meaning of death and into the human capacity for suicide or voluntary death.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780253335630
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
Publication date:	07/22/1999
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jean Améry (1921-1978) was born in Vienna and in 1938 emigrated to Belgium, where he joined the Resistance Movement. He was caught by the Nazis in 1943, tortured by the SS, and survived the next two years in the concentration camps. He was author of seven volumes of essays and two novels. He committed suicide in 1978.

John D. Barlow is Dean Emeritus of the School of Liberal Arts and Professor Emeritus of English and German at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. He is author of German Expressionist Film and several translations, including Jean Améry's On Aging.

Table of Contents

Translator's Preface
Translator's Introduction
Preface
I. Before the Leap
II. How Natural is Death?
III. To Lay Hands on Oneself
IV. Belonging to Oneself
V. The Road to the Open
Notes

Editorial Reviews

Five personal and philosophical essays that are highly insightful, poetic, if sometimes murky stylistically, metaphysically challenging, yet ultimately unsatisfying. Améry (né Hans Maier) was an Austrian-born Jew who migrated to Belgium and who joined the anti-Nazi resistance. He wrote an account of torture, Beyond the Mind's Limits, as well as On Aging (1994). The present book was written during the late 1970s between an unsuccessful and a successful suicide attempt. His interest is on the taking of one's own life not so much as an act, but rather as a "project" of individual thought and will that defies sociological and psychological truisms. Borrowing a concept from Jean-Paul Sartre, Améry helps us understand the sensibility of the suicide as someone who feels compelled to take his or her life in response to an échec, or irreversible personal disaster. The person with a "suicidal constitution," Améry notes in a typically intense passage, is moved by "disgust with the world, claustrophobia from the four walls closing in on each other as one hammers one's head against them." Serious problems arise, however, when Améry attempts to go beyond understanding the suicidal mentality to justifying the suicidal act. In his introduction, translator Barlow notes that Améry's approach is revealed by the very German word he uses for suicide, not the customary Selbstmord (literally, "self-murder") but rather Freitod ("voluntary death"). In approaching suicide as an act of liberation, he sometimes writes in downright romantic terms about the ultimate act of self-destruction—"we only arrive at ourselves in a freely chosen death." Simultaneously,Améry is dismissive, even contemptuous, of what he calls "ridiculously everyday life and its alienation." More disturbing yet, he writes of suicide almost as if the act took place in an interpersonal vacuum. In short, Améry's legacy in this, his last work, is to provide us with a moving, deep series of insights into the suicide's world, but an unconvincing attempt to normalize the suicide's leap of despair.

Kirkus Reviews