Here is a brief introduction/abstract to what I will publish later this year as a considerably long study, not a meditation on suicide tout court, but rather the occasional direct addressing - a peculiar version of apostrophe - of a “cruel” (crudelis/crudele) yet poeticized World, universe, or God, or, as Richard Rorty once put it, the “invisibilia Dei sive naturae” which science and thought are after. What I am most interested in is not just the implication of a universal understanding (an ear which can hear or compute our prayers, screams, adorations, and condemnations), but of the suicidal notion as a rejection or disobedience towards an existence viewed as ethically unacceptable, both in the sense of being morally wrong as well as a mistake (as though the World ought to have proceeded differently). In this interpretation, existence can be understood by the Heideggerian term Gevorfenheit, as a thrown project(ile), and as a command (arche, in the sense which Giorgio Agamben has considered, whereby “be!” is an imperative ordered to us, which precedes the infinitive “to be”, thus opening the possibility of a pre-ontology pertaining to the primitive state of affairs) to continue the trajectory of this project through living and procreation. The utterance of “Goodbye, cruel world”, in this precise formulation, brings up questions of how to find an ethics for living as the projectile, while facing the manifold cruelties which are, I claim, immanent to the structure of reality itself.
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“Goodbye, cruel world!”
This expression, exclamation, and – usually – resolution, although probably a bit too pithy to be the most common of last words de facto, is the quintessential catchphrase imagined to be uttered, written, or thought by a person whose next action is to commit suicide. Buggs Bunny said it, Pink Floyd sung it, and although by official accounts the last words of Hart Crane, that great poet of failure, were “Goodbye, everybody!”, before he hurdled himself over the banister of the steamship SS Oriza, it is tempting to imagine a second, internal utterance that he might have made to himself before plunging into the Atlantic; “Goodbye, cruel world!”, a drunken vulgarity, sealed with a kiss. It is of absolute relevance that the expression is used in vernacular from time to time before taking a strong drink of liquor. A kind of, “see you later”, and then an escape, ‘down the hatch’ if you will. Which brings us to the question of what, in the precise context we are speaking, suicide is. Self-annihilation, that much is certain, but also an annihilation of the world in question; a spurning, a turning away. It is an appropriate coincidence that in literature, to apostrophize – to address and object or abstraction (often an absent one) with the implication of human qualities, such as understanding – has the Greek origin apostrophe, literally “turning away”.
With modern eyes and heaps of historical evidence, we most commonly understand the figure of speech “Goodbye, cruel world,” and its other approximate formulations, as a signifier for the suicidal, often tragic, and distinctly poetic gesture. Balzac once wrote, after all, that “each suicide is a poem sublime in its melancholy.” And isn’t it just so, when we think of Dido casting herself upon Aeneas’ sword upon a pyre after he betrayed their love. And so on throughout history. Now, there are many reasons to which we attribute the phenomenon of suicide in humans (let us leave non-human animals out of the picture for the moment), and we can even speculate that the “Goodbye, cruel world,” sentiment itself did not awaken necessarily in tandem suicide, but in the mind of an early human, on the cusp of death in the howling prehistoric night, who in a moment of introspection felt some tinge of perplexed resentment toward his unpleasant situation and impending death, so that he might welcome what was to follow. We will come back to this lonely neanderthal who did not exactly kill himself, because what we are after here is not departing utterances of woe in general (after all, suicide in Roman legends like those of Lucretia, Cato, or Portia even in their own time connoted a virtuous glory associated with honor or patriotism), nor the notion of life’s intolerability brought on by external matters, but of the directly apostrophic “J’accuse!” toward this mortal coil and its ills, whether or not there is anybody listening, whether there exists an immanent God, or a deus absconditus, or, from a more modern purview, a cold and indifferent universe consisting only of – as Schopenhauer claimed – will and representation.




