Unwritten Suicide Note: A Meditation on the Other Side

Abstract

This auto-theoretical essay examines the philosophical and historical underpinnings of suicide through a critical analysis of the author’s own suicide note, employing psychoanalytic theory and post-colonial critique. Through historical investigation, the author traces how the concept of suicide, coined in 1642 by Sir Thomas Browne, emerged alongside new configurations of selfhood that were fundamentally shaped by colonial encounters, particularly the “discovery” of America and the rise in modern liberal thought. The analysis reveals how suicide’s conceptual structure is inextricably linked to Western modernity’s founding ruptures, where the capacity for self-destruction became a marker of Western subjectivity while being denied to colonized and enslaved peoples. The author concludes that suicide, far from being a purely personal act, is fundamentally structured by colonial history and white supremacy, functioning as a form of “white enjoyment” that attempts to resolve the metaphysical ruptures at the heart of Western consciousness.

This is my suicide note1. It is an apology, a grievance and a farewell addressed to those with whom I have shared the quiet of intimacy amid the disquiet of everything: parents, siblings, friends as well as “the one who got away”.

Yet, writing this undoes its intent, endlessly. In this deferral, I find both reprieve and deprivation: inscription denies finality while simultaneously invoking it. The structure of the signifier2—words, speech, discourse—both shapes and depletes my being3. In this disjunction between my being and its inscription, my suffering’s denouement is suspended. There, presence dissipates into the stillness of its own deferral.

But as much as these words are traces of my desire for death, they are at once traces of its reading—signifiers that both inscribe and interpret the rupture of my being. Like stillbirth, my letter marks a death suspended in becoming. It would be the stillness of a signified, as if the letter itself becomes a signifier for others who attempt, but fail, to signify me fully. In leaving loved ones unrequited, my suicide would reveal nothing. It would expose the emptiness of time, manifested in the grief over my “tragic loss”—a lament that resonates between the void of my absence and their new emptiness4.

As I write, the act is already named, structured, and anticipated. I study the very violence that possesses my thoughts, theorizing philosophically what I rehearse privately in the intervals between being and thought. This paradoxical stance reveals something beyond the origins of suicidal violence—something more fundamental: the violent origin of “suicide” itself as an idea, its invention as a way of naming and thus structuring the very possibility of self-destruction. What emerges is not merely a question of why some desire death, but how death itself became thinkable as an act of self-possession—a historical rupture that continues to structure desire itself. Like language itself, “suicide” precedes my birth and will persist beyond me, inscribing others in its logic5. It limns blurred boundaries between the signifier and possibility and between psychic and social life. It arrives with the impossible promise of witnessing one’s own dissolution—my death already written in the elsewhere of its origin.

And in this, my suicide would mark the limit of the speaking self, where language falters, where the act both emerges from and exceeds its signifier (Lacan 1990)6. Yet, my tendency towards the act remains unnoticed by others7. Even those closest to me, including colleagues in suicide research, remain oblivious to my rehearsals—hidden in quiet intervals between smiles, hugs, and casual quips. Silence tolls its thrall, ceaselessly writing its possibility into my thought. My fatal act would unfold as an endless exhale, heeded only as silence. In its unfolding, this nothingness would rupture the very reality it opposes. It would reveal the reality of the living, which only emerges through signifiers, as the speech of others gathers amid the void my absence creates. My final signifier would become the lack that structures their desire8.

Just as fatal attempts occur every 40 s, my suicide would mark the limit of the speaking self, where language falters. “Suicide” thus signifies rupture, where anguish breaks through the boundaries of language, defining and unraveling the subject. In this act, it transcends the very structure of its signifier, in which the signifier of “suicide” inscribes the lure of its own possibility, binding the subject to its passion. This passion lures with the promise of release, a fantasy that only amplifies the insomnia of consciousness. Suicide becomes the ultimate wish-fulfillment, inscribing the subject in the logics of its own passion, where the lack at the core of being drives the subject toward the impossibility of its own end9.

And yet, this inscription is never fully mine. “Suicide” struck me with its thought many years ago, inscribing my desire into the logics of its seduction—into the structure of its signifier. Its grip was already written, and its force was already articulated elsewhere.

Indeed, the failure of my suicide note persists, as is evident in the very act of reading. Its failure disseminates my intent. With this deferral comes the eloquence of desire—the totality of my cause and aim. It resists signification precisely because the inscription of its trace is disseminated elsewhere, preceding and exceeding—and ever rehearsing—my intent. This elsewhere intercedes in my attempts at purely being, at wholly existing unbound by others who read, write, think, and speak like me, as the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan would describe such an “Other” (Lacan 1990).

From this very intercession, I find myself out of joint with such an Other, whose enunciative elsewhere shapes and engenders my desire, staging the denouement of my becoming, ever wrecked against the Atlantic shoreline where the inscription of my origin lays bare. There, I materialize into consciousness as racialized, a living testament to the ongoing failure of genocide10. My desire—and with it my suicide—is written there, authored by others. This is the primal scene where my “suicide” finds its inscription: it is a violence against the self, made legible in the colonial encounter, where the boundaries of subjectivity are drawn not only by what is lived, but by what has been exiled, erased, or denied. In this deferral of being, “suicide” becomes not simply a question of personal agency or existential crisis, but the culmination of a history inscribed within the very structure of the signifier.

This primal scene of “suicide” unfolds against epochal shifts in human understanding, its emergence symptomatic of deeper ontological ruptures. “Suicide”, much like “love” before it, is an invention; it was coined in 1642 by Sir Thomas Browne amid the rise in modern liberal thought and in the wake of America’s “discovery” 150 years earlier (Browne 1970). The discovery of America ruptured the biblical Table of Nations11, once providing the divine organization of peoples and nations according to Noah’s descendants after the Great Flood. This rupture destabilized the cosmological and ontological order that had previously governed human existence12. As a land unknown to the biblical account, America was not figured in this genealogy, and thus, the telos of consciousness itself shifted: no longer ordained by the divine and upheld by monarchs and priests, it became anchored in individual generations, where each person was made sovereign of their own moral reason; this shift is inscribed in the very emergence of “suicide”, the binding of “sui” and “cidium”, which, alongside the axioms of “self” and “personhood”, sutures the enduring rupture that is “America”.

This ontological shift13, rooted in the rupture of established cosmologies, reverberates through the philosophical foundations of modernity. The rupture is echoed by John Locke, who declared, “in the beginning, the world was America”, positioning the “primitive” as existing outside of time, untouched by loss or lack and therefore excess, prefiguring the logic of accumulation and desire central to modernity (Locke 2008). In this schema, the “civilized”, haunted by the prospect of being “out of time”, reckoned with their contingency, justifying conquest as a rightful act. Locke’s colonial vision framed the natives’ lack of “property” not simply as an absence, but as a lack of lack, precluding both loss and the protection of the social contract. This, in turn, constructed the “civilized” subject as the rightful master of desire while positioning the indigenous as existing outside the law, in excess, without the capacity for either desire or loss.

America’s place as a lost paradise—untouched by the original sin—frames the African slave not only as an outsider to freedom’s promise but to humanity’s very narrative. Racialized as incapable of self-possession, the African slave was rendered fundamentally incapable of suicide—not as a matter of existential freedom, but as an impossibility rooted in the denial of subjectivity and self-reflection14. In the logic of slavery, blackness existed not just outside desire and loss, but outside the very capacity to choose life or death. Thus, Western consciousness, borne from this very rupture, becomes complicit in its own compulsive reenactment—a self-sustaining return to the original scene of trauma. This cyclical return reasserts its founding conditions, marked indelibly by the absence of America, the site of “paradise lost”, the site of racial desire that could never be fully realized, only eternally deferred. The Atlantic shoreline traces the contours of this ongoing rupture, where self-discovery unfolds, and “suicide” looms as a persistent possibility, essential to being-towards the opening of “freedom”.

Yet, even as “suicide” emerges as a defining possibility, desire itself arises from this rupture in being, opening that emptiness where presence abides. In this void, each attempt to write myself into existence becomes an ongoing rupture of origins.

Desire disjoints me in its rupture, subsisting as it does in lack15, in absence. It disjoints me ever more intensely with each word16 I write here and each utterance made elsewhere. It is a futile gesture towards the one signifier, the one word, that might singularly punctuate my disquiet and return me to the quiet of origins marked by rupture. Rupture is the syntax of “suicide”, giving form to its excess of coherence. For the structure of its signifier reveals nothing but brute flesh in the maw of others, left in the lurch for meaning. There, in the agon of alterity17, discourse, and rupture, the flesh—a remnant of my intent—would materialize into a corpse of loss. But whose loss?

Through the peal of its nothingness—taken as “eternal silence”—my corpse would incessantly evacuate the pneuma, psyche, and breath that once gave it bodily form. Inspired by something other than my “self”, by the void of “self” itself, I distend with meaning, animate with exigency, echoing the imperium of language, whose sovereign mark is “I”.

“I” speaks, writes, thinks, and desires ahead of me. I am nowhere to be found18.

And so, upon dying, I would be left there, nowhere, to be accounted for by another than myself. Its inscriptions of intent, the track marks of my desire written elsewhere in my flesh, would be usurped by others—just as you do now—autopsying them, indeed auto-seeing, for meaning.

You would inspire my flesh with breath, billowing it with the “kiss of life”. Yet, breath—call it pneuma (spirit) or psyche (soul)—is nothing other than the excess of mediated air, an elemental substance intrinsic to none. It is precisely this substance that we gasped upon our umbilical rupture at birth, compelled by the force of vital necessity. With a cry, we void our flesh of amniotic fluid, and in this oceanic loss, we encounter an essential emptiness—a void to which we are condemned to give bodily form. We imbue it with meaning as we mediate between the inner and outer world, between nothingness and infinity. Our navel, the scar of umbilical rupture, commemorates this natal loss19, this diremption of worldliness, much like a cenotaph20 holding only mythic figments of the “motherland” in violent rapture—a remnant of its children defending its honor against those who threaten to denigrate it. Our navel gnarls us between our first and last breath. Our last expiration recalls our first inspiration as a mediation of untainted origin, as nothingness is always-already present.

And in precisely this mediation that the act of suicide takes shape, breathing meaning into the dead letters of my suicide note. In doing so, you would transmute my corpse into a corpus of unrequited desire, read and interred in the elsewhere that is you and others, in the reliquary of your mind. This is the true tragedy of suicide: the self-destructive act, reminiscent of literary theorist Roland Barthes’ idea of the “death of the author” in writing21, betrays its own intent. And as philosopher E.M Cioran concedes, “It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late” (Cioran 2012). To this, I would add, in the face of the Other: whose desire are you reading, writing, speaking, and thinking?

Is suicide, then, not always a futile attempt to sacrifice oneself for nothing, to plug the void in the Other—the void of whiteness22, wrought by colonization and slavery? And for whose enjoyment—that impossible enjoyment of lacking nothing but nothingness itself? As its longue durée in Western thought attests if looked critically awry enough, “suicide” is white enjoyment, Sadean in its gestalt of a voluptuous quiet in the disquiet of everything emergent in the wake of “presence”. Such presence is inseparably entwined with the projection of whiteness, which veils the violence inscribed in its metaphysical foundations. This veil, behind the venerated imagoes of absolute being—from Socrates’ dualism to the beguiling death mask of L’inconnue de la Seine23—conceals the brutal undercurrents of its origin. And yet, I write despite myself…