Suicide at a distance

Abstract

Knowledge of suicide is made through violent epistemologies that sever self-destruction from space, time, and place. As an inherently incomprehensible issue, efforts to make sense of suicide through abstraction have the paradoxical effect of inhibiting understanding. This paper argues that the incoherences characteristic of suicide are not an obstacle for knowing, but rather a cause to accept knowledge that is partial and indirect. Thinking with assemblage, this paper develops a relational conceptualization of distance to interrogate the knowledge that shapes pesticide suicide in India; ‘distancing-through-engagement’ brings to light the contradictions and obscured power relations through which understandings of suicide are made.