Critchley uncompromisingly busts taboos and baseless myths about suicide with intellectual distance and gentle humor. He shows that society is often too lazy (or frightened) to face this unpleasant phenomenon and rather relies on religious prejudices or ignorance. Even in modern and secular communities it is very convenient to classify all suicides simply as a case of untreated mental illness. But…. can you definitely rule out that suicide can be also committed by a perfectly sane, mentally bala...

A finely written précis on a subject of perennial importance.Critchley examines our predominant (Western) social and religious attitudes about suicide, and traces their historical context. Contemporary examples of suicide in its various modalities are also provided.I wish this book were longer and more fully fleshed-out.My two main criticisms are that Critchley sometimes seems seduced by the elegance of his own phraseology, to the detriment of his philosophical rigor, and that he clings to a ver...

i liked this. i think if you are in a bad place you shouldnt be looking for triggering material in the first place, but if you choose to read this, read it until the end. critchley lays out the arguments for and against suicide as only a tenured professor of philosophy could, and it somehow didnt outrage or anger me as i imagined it would. he takes a critical look at suicide and for some reason it put me at ease. being suicidal isnt irrational or crazy or insane, but from a philosophical angle,

A great book that I find myself lucky to read!A very insightful approach to what is suicide, why we act it and a very introspective contemplation on suicide notes.

It’s pretty sweet and succinct, but I think the harping against christianity and religious arguments against suicide for so long detract from the fascinating 3rd and 4th chapters (which I found incredibly moving and educational).

Fascinating study, reflections on a taboo subject, covering religious, national, ethical, community views, a passage on suicide notes and a questioning on Leve and Woolf. Questioning but compelling, another fine title from Fitzcarraldo Editions.

A philosopher retreats to the English coast to write about suicide, having previously organised a jokey creating writing workshop in which participants tried to compose suicide notes. He tells us "For reasons we don't need to go into, my life has dissolved in the past year or so, like sugar in hot tea." (pg.16). What we get are some loose meditations and review of the literature, including the ancients as well as moderns such as E.M.Cioran, Virginia Woolf and Kurt Cobain, and his experiences, wi...

Critchley is a philosophy professor at New York’s New School for Social Research. However, he wrote this short essay from a beach hotel in East Anglia. Although he reassures readers with his first line that “This book is not a suicide note,” he also hints that its writing was inspired by personal trouble: “my life has dissolved over the past year or so, like sugar in hot tea.” Not suicidal himself, then, but certainly sympathetic to those who are driven to self-murder.This concise essay illumina...

It's quite a short book. It started out promising but in the middle the author fell into commonplace examples and got pretty scattered. I get the feeling he didn't go all the way into what he wanted to say. He tiptoed around the topic and flip-flopped sides taking cover on what other authors said before. No wonder he finished with an afterword by David Hume, an author less afraid of tackling the subject head on.However I understand that in these times a topic like this one is thorny and the reac...

Rolled my eyes at the end

by seriously taking a look at suicide instead of that instant ray gun zap of IT BAD DONT DO IT, i found it to be one of the most life afirming things i've read. Critchley is a total G.

This essay is only 76 pages long, and it is absolutely beautiful. I don’t agree with everything Simon Critchley writes in here, but he writes it all with such grace, humour and tenderness, that it’s impossible to ignore. The philosophy, along with ancient and modern history intertwined, made this an experience of a book, and it really touched me.

"Perhaps the closest we come to dying is through writing, in the sense that writing is a leave-taking from life, a temporary abandonment of the world and one's petty preoccupations in order to try to see things more clearly. One can lay things to rest in writing: ghosts, hauntings, regrets, and the memories that flay us alive."RATING: 3.5/5This was an unexpected bookmail Tanya had send my way through my booksta wishlist. My father had signed for it when it came early morning, and on seeing it, h...

Once in a while, you come across a book that blows your mind away. This book is just that. Simon begins off with introducing people who committed suicide after submitting their work on suicide. Sylvia Plath came to my mind and had me thinking what if there is a correlation between people who have penned their thoughts on suicide and the actual act of committing suicide. The data suggests such a possibility but this book is not about that.Simon clarifies his position right in the beginning, he do...

Good place to start when reading of the end. Very delicate and even heartrending in parts.

It's all very well to have such expansive ideas and thoughts on a this most sensitive and much ignored topic, but would it kill an academic to write in way that isn't snooty or inaccessible without a degree and is in fact actually readable for the layman?

Critchley offers a new perspective on suicide outside the usual moral, religion, and ethic lenses. He doesn't try to justify nor rebuke the act of ending one's life with one's own hand. He uses suicide notes to give readers a better understanding of the reasons why people take their own life. It might be due to hopelessness, despair, depression, avoiding consequences, or narcissism.

To be human is to have the capacity, at each and every moment, of killing oneself. Incarceration, humiliation, disappointment, disease – the world can do all of this to us, but it cannot remove the possibility of suicide. For as long as we keep this power in our hands, then we are, in some minimal but real sense, free. (72)Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the words, "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide." I think that anyone who has reflected deeply on

Until today, suicide in many jurisdictions is either considered a crime or a 'grave public wrong' (as in the state of New York). While the topic of suicide attracts much curiosity, it has been very much of a taboo. Critchley points out that, as a society, we lack a language to talk about it. Critchley opens up a space for thinking about suicide as a free act.The book first gives an overview of the topic's history in philosophic thought. While Ancient philosophers were open to the idea of a "just...

Often my reasons for buying a book are ridiculous. A few weeks back I read a piece in the The Guardian about a new bookstore in London where literature and lattes don’t mix, whose managers offer visitors a curated selection of "suggestive themes designed to provoke browsers into making unexpected connections." The spotlight, we’re told, will be on "cutting-edge independent publishers." Fitzcarraldo Editions is the first example, so I went hunting on its site and selected Critchley’s volume as my...