Talk: The Reason of Redemption. On the social dimension of suicide

Lecture and talk with Thorsten Benkel

The French philosopher Michel Foucault calls suicide "a quite harmless pleasure". However, many survivors and some survivors suffer from the fact that beloved others (or they themselves) have taken the path of suicide. In describing such acts, a well-worn terminology is often used that on the one hand emphasizes the subjectivity of the act and on the other hand suggests a shaking of the social order. Suicide thus moves in an idiosyncratic way between individualistic liberties and supra-individual claims to reason. This lecture explores the social roots of suicide and attempts to show that even the frowned-upon word "suicide" can serve a meaningful function.

Thorsten Benkel is a sociologist at the University of Passau. He has conducted several research projects in the context of dying, death, and mourning, was responsible for the largest empirical cemetery study in the German-speaking world, and is, among other things, author or editor of the books Zwischen Leben und Tod, Die Verwaltung des Todes, Die Zukunft des Todes, and Wissenssoziologie des Todes.