The Paradox of Self-Killing

As a form of violence, self-annihilation is inherently paradoxical, as subject is both perpetrator and victim alike. No other act of violence directs physical injury at the self with the conscious intent to bring about one's own demise.

For example, morally condemned by Christianity as the sin of despair since antiquity, self-killing emerged throughout the medieval West as the crime of self-murder. Just as Renaissance humanists had revived Roman stoic justifications for ending one's own life, Reformed Protestants dimin­ished the role of free will by reinterpreting self-murder as a sign of inescap­able predestination. The Enlightenment came to favour broader social and medical explanations, even inventing a Latinate neologism, ‘suicide', to depict self-destructive behaviour as a regrettable pathology. It remained for nineteenth-century moral statisticians to invent a global master narra­tive of ever-increasing rates of suicide as an unavoidable social by-product of modernity.

Nonetheless, Western notions about self-murder were by no means ubi­quitous during the early modern period. And so this chapter not only considers the origin and development of Western perceptions, but also locates them within a comparative global context. In particular, comparisons are made with East and South Asia, where our knowledge of their early modern cultures of suicide permit the adumbration of critical hypotheses regarding differing perceptions of self-killing.