Zupančič, Alenka. The Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso. 2000.
After an act, I am ‘not the same as before’. In the act, the subject is annihilated and subsequently reborn (or not); the act involves a kind of temporary eclipse of the subject. The act is therefore always a ‘crime’, a ‘transgression’ — of the limits of the symbolic community to which I belong. 83
It might, therefore, be instructive to draw a distinction , with Kant’s help, between two different logics of suicide . First there is the suicide that obeys the logic of sacrifice. When duty calls, I sacrifice this or that and, if necessary, even my life . Here, we are dealing with the logic of infinite ‘purification’, in which sacrificing my life is just ‘ another step’ forward – only one among numerous ‘ objects’ that have to be sacrificed. The fact that it is a final step is mere coincidence; or, to put it in Kantian terms, it is an empirical, not a transcendental necessity.
It is this logic that governs Kant’s postulate of the immortality of the soul, and serves to preserve the consistency of the big Other.
According to this logic, it is the subject who has to separate herself infinitely from everything that belongs to the register of the pathological. At the same time, (the position of) the big Other only gets stronger; its ‘sadism’ increases with every new sacrifice the subject makes, and it therefore demands more and more of the subject. We can point to examples from popular culture, which seems to be more and more fascinated by this superegoic side of morality. Consider, for instance, Terminator 2.
The Terminator first helps people to wipe off the face of the earth everything that could lead, in the future, to the invention of machines such as the Terminator (and thus to catastrophe, and the eruption of ‘radical evil’). In the end, the Terminator him/itself remains the only model that could serve to decipher all the necessary steps for the production of such cyborgs. He/it throws him-/itself into a pool of white-hot iron in order to save the human race from catastrophe. The same type of suicide occurs in Alien 3.
Ripley first exterminates all aliens, only to find out in the end that the last one resides inside herself. In order to eliminate this last alien , she has to kill herself — she has to destroy the ‘stranger’ in herself, to cut off the last remains of the ‘pathological’ in herself.
The second type of suicide is less popular, for it serves no cause, no purpose. What is at stake is not that in the end we put on the altar of the Other our own life as the most we have to offer. The point is that we ‘kill’ ourselves through the Other, in the Other.
We annihilate that which — in the Other, in the symbolic order — gave our being identity, status, support and meaning.
This is the suicide to which Kant refers in the famous footnote from The Metaphysics of Morals in which he discusses regicide (the execution of Louis XVI) .
‘Regicide’ is not really the right term, because what preoccupies Kant is precisely the difference between the murder of a monarch (regicide) and his formal execution. It is in relation to the latter that Kant says: ‘it is as if the state commits suicide’, and describes it in terms of what he elsewhere calls ‘diabolical evil’. What we are dealing with is the difference between the ‘king’s two bodies’ . Were the monarch simply killed, murdered, this would strike a blow only at his ’empirical body’, whereas his ‘other body’, incarnated in his symbolic mandate, would survive more or less unharmed.
Yet his formal execution, which Kant — in spite of, or even because of, his almost obsessive insistence on form — describes as outrageously useless, is precisely what strikes a blow at the monarch’s ‘symbolic body’, that is, the given symbolic order.
Why is it that for Kant this act of ‘the people’ has the structure of suicide? Because people are constituted as The People only in relation to this symbolic order. Outside it, they are nothing more than ‘masses’ with no proper status. It is the monarch ( in his symbolic function) who gives people their symbolic existence, be it ever so miserable. A very audible undertone of Kant’s argument thus implicitly poses this question: if the French people were so dissatisfied with their monarch, why didn’t they simply kill him; why did they have to perform a formal execution, and thus shake the very ground beneath their feet (that is, ‘commit suicide’) ?