View source for Event:Suicidal Remains and Resistance 2017: Special Edited Collection: Suicidal Remains and Resistance

{{Event
|Acronym=Suicidal Remains and Resistance 2017
|Title=Suicidal Remains and Resistance  2017 : Special Edited Collection: Suicidal Remains and Resistance
|Type=Conference
|City=N/A
|Official Website=http:///cfp/allcat
|pageCreator=Omid.nn
|pageEditor=Omid.nn
|contributionType=1
|Single Day Event=no
|Start Date=Invalid date
|End Date=2017/07/28
|Academic Field=Humanities
|Event Status=as scheduled
|Event Mode=on site
}}
{{Event Deadline
|Submission Deadline=2017/08/01
}}
{{S Event}}
Judith Butler’s Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (2015) might best
be illustrated as a treatise on the political, social, and ethical
stakes—drawing from moral philosophy’s elementary question ‘how best to
live?’—of the conditions of livable life. Butler writes, “it may be that the
question of how to live a good life depends upon having the power to lead a life
as well as the sense of having a life, or indeed, the sense of being alive”
(212). In a similar vein, evoking Achille Mbembe’s deployment of the
necropolitical, the chasms between rich and poor, human and non-human, citizen
and non-citizen, the sovereign, “define[s] who matters and who does not, who is
disposable and who is not” (27). And, as it were, the lines between life and
death reveal the myriad ways in which the living, the dead, and the living dead
are blurred. Suicide, the topic of this special edited collection, brings into a
single space an assemblage of precarious conditions that confound the social,
political, economical, ecological, historical, cultural, aesthetical, and
pathological devastations inflicted upon human and, invariably, non-human
experience. In response to the incredible flourishing of critical
interdisciplinary studies—an interface for politics, biopower, necropower, and
social justice—continued philosophical and theoretical discussions
metamorphosize epistemic boundaries and confines in terms of ‘what is life?’ and
‘what is death?’.

Building upon and deepening these insights, this edited collection traces
suicide both as a critical concept and material social phenomenon, questioning
what it is precisely that such a critical concept conjures, embodies, and
entangles, undoing its linguistic, historical, ontological, and epistemological
presumptions. The revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher, Frantz Fanon, in
effort to address the perpetual opposition to the black other and in the pursuit
of something outside of human life, stresses “a world of reciprocal
recognitions” in Black Skin, White Masks (1952, 2008, 193). By emphasizing
ontology and the existential status of being (non)human, Fanon bestows the gift
of suicidal remains in an extended footnote on attitudes toward death,
particularly when he cites Richard Wright’s white character claiming, “If I were
a Negro I’d commit suicide,” juxtaposed to everyday talk imparting that the
Black man does not “commit” suicide. Drawing on feminist and literary theorist,
Gayatri Spivak, suicide, Spivak opines, does not belong to and is not of the
“third-world.” Suicide, then, is fabricated, assembled, and instituted by the
West. In The History of Sexuality Volume I (1978, 1990), Michel Foucault
sketches, although briefly, the relation between life, death, power, and more
specifically, suicide. Rather acutely, he writes:

"It is not surprising that suicide—once a crime—since it was a way to usurp the
power of death which the sovereign alone, whether the one here below or the Lord
above, had the right to exercise—became, in the course of the nineteenth
century, one of the first conducts to enter into the sphere of sociological
analysis; it testified to the individual and private right to die, at the
borders and in the interstices of power that was exercised over life. This
determination to die, strange and yet so persistent and constant in its
manifestations, and consequently so difficult to explain as being due to
particular circumstances or individual accidents, was one of the first
astonishments of a society in which political power had assigned itself the task
of administering life." (138-139)


Tracing Foucault’s suicidal remains, then, recognizing the sovereign’s right of
death and power over life as the background deployed in the historiographical
operation of sexuality, we can press the relation between sexuality, gender, and
suicide. Does suicide eschew biopolitical and necropolitical power of death?
What is the role of agency and subject formation when suicide is positioned as a
critical concept? What historical underpinnings conceal new theories, thinking,
and ways of being in the world when suicide is interrogated, complicated, and
unraveled from questions centering “private” and “public” death? When is suicide
“private,” and for whom? When is suicide “public,” and how does this public
death become spectacularized and pathologized? Under what conditions is suicide
publicly grievable? When does the governance of suicide preclude private/public
occasions of mourning?

With Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), analyses of
suicide ought to ignite and establish how histories of loss, death, suicide,
and, illuminating Agamben’s “whatever singularity,” corrode the logic of
sovereignty. Benjamin’s “historical materialism” as a means to creativity,
animating and reanimating, constituting and reconstituting, strains the relation
between the past and the present, and incessantly, the living, the dead, and the
living dead. Speculative of historicism, historical materialism draws near
mourning, desiring to bring critical perspectives to the history of the present.
In the case of suicide, the editors take seriously, with a nod toward Jacques
Derrida, the work of mourning, acknowledging its hauntological absence, and
indeed, the ghostly figure of suicide and its temporal uncanniness. That is, the
editors seek submissions that work against the historiographical operation of
suicide under pathological, criminal, and eschatological discourses, and
instead, heed the call to impute generative suicidal remains of mourning,
resistance, the political, and social ontology--falling toward the question,
“What remains?”

This edited collection reanimates, enlivens, and affronts the myriad ways in
which suicide complicates everyday understandings of the concept as such,
shedding light upon uncharted, unforeseen, and buried philosophies and
narratives. The editors encourage submissions that take psychological,
psychoanalytical, sociological, and empirical studies of suicide to task. We are
especially interested in submissions from social and political philosophy,
critical disability studies, transgender studies, queer studies/theory, and
critical prison studies that engage suicide in relation to biopolitics,
necropolitics, environmental studies and philosophy, moral philosophy and
ethics, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, citizenship, class, (inter)national
occupations, and other social constructivist modes of difference.

By centering suicide, these are the kinds of questions suicide as a critical
concept and social phenomenon engenders and evokes, though, not limited to the
following:

• What new kinds of epistemological, political, ontological, and aesthetical
frameworks emerge from suicide as a critical concept in the broader purview(s)
of critical theory, social theory, politics, cultural studies, and philosophy?
• What role does the logic of suicide maintain in discourses of race, gender,
sexuality, nationality, disability, ethnicity, and class? How does the
application of suicide as a critical concept alter or reconfigure these
discourses? How does suicide change across boundaries of race, ethnicity, class,
and gender?
• Given the ways in which disabled people experience high rates of social
disenfranchisement, what is the relation between necropolitics, disability, and
suicide (i.e. assisted suicide)? How can critical disabilities studies
perspectives further interrogate the social phenomenon of suicide in ways that
have been unacknowledged and under-theorized?
• In what ways do we see suicide strategically used as a rhetorical device
against Black livability? More specifically, how is suicide used rhetorically in
the erasure of Black lives, and indeed, disruptions of Black mourning? In fact,
how can we interrogate suicide--ethically, politically, and
socially--questioning the ways in which the nation-state deploys “suicide” as a
tool of erasure, racialized violence, and epistemic governance? What role does
the prison-industrial-complex have in this rhetorical erasure? We are
particularly thinking of Sandra Bland, though, we recognize this was not an
isolated case. #SayHerName
• Turning away from the psychological and sociological skeptical discussions on
nonhuman suicide, dating back to the early and mid-nineteenth century, and,
instead, centering the environment and the nonhuman, through what purviews can
we see nonhuman suicide? How can we, and should we, best think about, discuss,
and recognize nonhuman suicide? Should we anthropomorphize nonhuman suicide? Is
it our responsibility to recognize a scorpion stinging itself; a whale beaching
itself; dogs jumping off of Overtoun Bridge in Scotland; elephants standing on
their own trunks, suffocating themselves to end Phajaan in Thailand; exploding
ants and honeybees sacrificing themselves; etc. as suicide? What is nonhuman
suicide?
• How does the “imperative” of preventing suicide relate to the biopolitical
subjugation of marginalized bodies? Who are these efforts for and who is left
out? Who controls suicide prevention hotlines and nonprofits? How does ensuring
an economically viable workforce relate to suicide prevention?
• With Foucault on the horizon of thought, in what ways do we continue to see
the criminalization of suicide, especially at the “dirty hands” of mainstream
media? Here, we aim to remember MarShawn M. McCarrell II and media coverage of
his death, wherein the language of “commits” suicide comports us toward the
historicity of suicide. Further, this complicates power’s biopolitical control
of who dies, when they die, and how they ought to die. Instead, we raise the
question: how can we come to critically reinterpret, destabilize, reconfigure,
and decriminalize suicide?
• Given the problematic of suicide, biopolitics, necropolitics, and
institutional power, then, what are the ways in which we ought to theorize
suicide anew beyond its psychological, sociological, and medical confines?
Drawing from recent media (mainstream and other platforms such as social media)
how has suicide been a pathologizing caricature of what it means to be queer and
transgender? How are queer and transgender communities depicted through the
critical concept of suicide? And, importantly, how ought queer and transgender
communities be seen?
• Within media, the spectre of the suicide contagion - the notion that more
people will commit suicide when an individual’s suicide is reported on - posits
suicide as a topic that must be concealed and privatized. How does this situate
death as, Foucault describes, “the most private thing of all” (248)? How is the
withholding of public discourse on suicide limiting critical analysis of the
topic itself?
• In light of recent events deemed as “suicide-by-cop,” we question what it
means to die “privately” juxtaposed to what it means to die “publicly.”
Recalling Kayden Clarke, Robert Dentmond, and Daniel Perez, what does it mean to
dial 911, placing a “suicidal call,” when police violence and murder supersedes?
What is the relationship between suicide and national policing practices,
including the nation-state’s militarized and medical authority? What is the
relation between Transgender, Black, and Latinx gun violence imposed by the
state? And importantly, how does this relation untether the being of suicide and
philosophies of life?
• What trajectories or new modes of thought reveal themselves? As we orientate
toward these new trajectories/modes, how do we begin to trace the impact on
social justice, grassroots organizing, and scholastic solidarity?

And/or that engage the following topics:

Suicide; Necropolitics; Biopolitics; Livability and Grievability;
Suicide-By-Cop; Suicide Bomber; Critical Prison Studies;
Prison-Industrial-Complex; Critical Disability Studies; Human and Non-Human
Suicide; The Environment and Suicide; Transgender Studies; Queer Studies/Theory;
Social and Political Philosophy; Phenomenology; Antigone; Greek Tragedy; Suicide
& the Literary; Mourning, Loss, Melancholia; Objects and Ruins; Space, Place,
and Time; Aesthetics; Agency and Subject Formation; Black Lives Matter;
Transgender Life & Death; Critical Theory; Kinship; Indigeneity; Postcolonial
Theory and Decolonial Studies; Feminist Theory; Legal Theory; Medicine & Social
(In)Justice; Pathologization and Depathologization; Criminalization; and
Religion, Theology, Eschatology.

Please send chapter proposals (abstracts) of up to 300 words and CV to Sage
Perdue (mperdue2@ucmerced.edu), Bianca Negrete Coba (bnegrete2@ucmerced.edu) and
Eli Erlick (eerlick@ucsc.edu) by August 1, 2017.

Timeline:
300-word chapter proposal due Tuesday, August 1, 2017
Acceptance of proposal determined by Friday, September 1, 2017
Chapter draft (8,000 – 10,000 words) due Friday, December 15th, 2017 (tentative
based on publisher)