Suicidal Thoughts [Hobbes, Foucault, And the Right to Die]

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Philosophy & Social Criticism

DOI: 10.1177/0191453706064899 2006; 32; 601 Philosophy Social Criticism

Thomas F. Tierney Suicidal thoughts: Hobbes, Foucault and the right to die

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Thomas F. Tierney

Suicidal thoughtsHobbes, Foucault and the right to die

Abstract Liberal articulations of the right to die generally focus onbalancing individual rights against state interests, but this approach doesnot take full advantage of the disruptive potential of this contested right.This article develops an alternative to the liberal approach to the right todie by engaging the seemingly discordant philosophical perspectives ofMichel Foucault and Thomas Hobbes. Despite Foucault’s objections, arapprochement between these perspectives is established by focusing ontheir shared emphasis on the role that death plays in the order of modernity.After the article has established the complementarity of Foucault andHobbes, Hobbes’ unique stance toward suicide is first viewed in the contextof the early-modern hostility toward suicide, and then contrasted withFoucault’s Stoic-inspired affirmation of suicide. This comparison of thesetwo philosophers’ positions on suicide opens to contestation dimensions ofmodern subjects that remain undisturbed by liberal approaches to the rightto die.

Key words bio-power · Michel Foucault · governmentality · ThomasHobbes · liberalism · right to die · self-preservation · Seneca · Stoicism ·suicide

[N]ecessity of nature maketh men to will and desire bonum sibi, that whichis good for themselves, and to avoid that which is hurtful; but most of all,the terrible enemy of nature, death, from whom we expect both the loss ofall power, and also the greatest of bodily pains in the losing; it is not againstreason, that a man doth all he can to preserve his own body and limbsboth from death and pain. (Hobbes, 1640[1839]: 83)

[I]f you take proper care of yourself, that is, if you know ontologically whatyou are, if you know what you are capable of . . . if you know what thingsyou should and should not fear, if you know what you can reasonably hopefor and on the other hand what things should not matter to you, if you

PSCPHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 32 no 5 • pp. 601–638Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453706064899



know, finally, that you should not be afraid of death – if you know all this,you cannot abuse your power over others. Thus there is no danger.(Foucault, 1984[1997a]: 288)

Of the many bio-ethical dilemmas that have appeared on the moralhorizon of medically advanced cultures over the last three decades, oneof the most visible and divisive issues is the recently asserted ‘right todie’.1 This right usually appears in public discourse in the form ofphysician-assisted suicide (PAS) and/or the related practice of euthan-asia, but also includes the less controversial right to refuse life-savingtreatment. While the right to refuse medically necessary treatment hasbeen widely accepted for decades, the right to hasten one’s death withthe help of a physician, either through assisted suicide or euthanasia,was contested in the legislative and judicial forums of many nationsduring the last decade of the 20th century. Australia, Canada, Columbia,England, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines,South Africa, Sweden and the United States all dealt with attempts tolegalize PAS and/or euthanasia during the 1990s. Although none of thesenations legalized either form of life-terminating act, the Northern Terri-tory of Australia authorized both PAS and euthanasia in 1996, but theAustralian Senate quickly overturned the policy in 1997.2 In the UnitedStates, the citizens of Oregon legalized PAS in 1994 through the ballotinitiative known as the Death with Dignity Act, and in 1996 defeateda repeal measure; the law went into effect in 1997, making Oregon theonly American state in which assisted suicide is legal. Holland has, ofcourse, been the center of attention in discussions of PAS and euthan-asia. Since 1973 the Dutch allowed, and gradually formalized, an excep-tion to the national prohibitions against killing and assisted suicide, andin 2001 the Netherlands became the first nation to legalize both PASand euthanasia when it passed the Termination of Life on Request andAssisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act.3 The next year Belgiumfollowed the Dutch example, in part, and legalized euthanasia but notPAS (Watson, 2001: 1024). Recently, Switzerland has become Europe’scenter for ‘suicide tourism’ due to a unique provision of its 1942 lawagainst assisted suicide, which allows anyone to assist in a suicide foraltruistic reasons (Hurst and Mauron, 2003: 271–3). Clearly, the rightto die will continue to be a hotly contested topic of public discourse inthe near future.

Since the right to die usually appears in a juridical context in liberaldemocratic cultures, involving legislatures and/or courts, the issue isnormally addressed as a question of balancing the right of individualsto end their lives in a manner of their own choosing, against the state’sinterest in preserving life. For instance, in 1997 the US Supreme Court

602Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (5)



heard two cases in which state prohibitions against assisted suicide werechallenged by a group of physicians and terminally ill patients.4 Sixprominent liberal philosophers whom Michael Sandel dubbed the‘Dream Team’ (Sandel, 1997: 27) – Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel,Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon and Judith JarvisThompson – filed an amicus curaie brief in these cases, and alsopublished their ‘Philosophers’ Brief’ in The New York Review of Books.The Dream Team predictably argued that ‘[a] person’s interest in follow-ing his own convictions at the end of life is so central a part of the moregeneral right to make “intimate and personal choices” for himself thata failure to protect that particular interest [from state interference]would undermine the general right altogether’ (Dworkin et al., 1997:44). The court ultimately rejected that argument, however, and unani-mously upheld the state prohibitions of assisted suicide. In the majorityopinion Chief Justice Rehnquist emphasized that states have an‘“unqualified interest in the preservation of human life,” . . . even forthose who are near death’ (521 U.S. 728, 730). This balancing actbetween the rights of individuals and the interests of the state mayindeed be required by the liberal juridical paradigm, but it misses theopportunity this bio-ethical issue presents both for revealing the way inwhich medical power and legal power are bound together in a particu-lar relationship to death in modernity, and for fostering reconsiderationof the role that this juridico-medical power plays in shaping andordering the identities of modern individuals.

In order to cultivate some of the disruptive and hopeful possibili-ties that the newly asserted right to die presents within this particularconfiguration of power, I will offer an alternative perspective to liberal-ism that focuses not on the question of whether this contested rightshould be sanctioned by the law, but rather on the changing nature ofthe subject that can assert such a right. In developing this genealogicalapproach I will, unsurprisingly, rely to a great degree on MichelFoucault’s perspective on the unique nature of modern forms of power.In the first section of this article I will examine the conception of powerthat Foucault articulated in his publications, course lectures and inter-views from the second half of the 1970s, and link this work with hisearlier analysis of the birth of modern medicine. My primary aim in thissection will be to emphasize how a crucial inversion in the status ofdeath occurred both in the exercise of power and the development ofmedicine in modernity. After discussing the role that death plays inFoucault’s analysis of modernity I will turn, perhaps more surprisingly,to the political theory of Thomas Hobbes, and argue that not only isLeviathan compatible with Foucault’s perspective on the nature ofmodern power, but the combination of these two perspectives revealscrucial facets of the modern subject that are implicated in the assertion

603Tierney: Suicidal thoughts: Hobbes and Foucault



of the right to die. This combination may be surprising because, as PaulRabinow recently remarked, ‘Foucault never seriously entertained aview of the individual as bearer of natural rights’ (Rabinow, 1997:xv–xvi), and in particular, he was explicitly and emphatically dismissiveof Hobbes’ natural rights theory. Therefore, before I can engage theirperspectives I will have to answer Foucault’s objections to takingHobbes’ political theory seriously. After establishing this rapprochementbetween these early- and late-modern thinkers, I will examine Hobbes’prescient position on suicide in the context of the 17th-century suicidedebate, and then contrast Hobbes’ stance toward suicide with Foucault’sadmittedly extreme position. From the Hobbesian/Foucauldian perspec-tive developed here, the right to die should no longer appear simply asa matter of balance between the individual and the state, but shouldinstead raise unsettling questions about the very nature of modernsubjects.

Death, medicine and bio-power

In the mid-1970s Foucault underwent something of a crisis regardinghis earlier publications. Looking back on this body of work, heannounced in his 1975–6 course at the Collège de France that hisprevious investigations ‘never added up to a coherent body of work’,and were ‘fragments of research, none of which was completed, andnone of which was followed through’ (2003: 3; and 1980c: 78). Hisdissatisfaction with the earlier work turned on his recognition of theinadequacy of the implicit conception of power that informed hisimportant analyses of those disciplines that rendered human being intoan object of knowledge. In this earlier work he primarily treated poweras a repressive force that excluded, silenced and marginalized that whichdid not fit within the order that was established through its exercise. Tomove beyond this limited understanding of power, Foucault at firstadopted a Nietzschean stance that saw power relations as a struggleamong competing forces, and relied heavily on militaristic images ofwar. In Discipline and Punish (1975[1979]), for instance, Foucaultargued that disciplinary techniques do not simply repress criminality,but rather produce dangerous individuals, such as the delinquent, andconcluded the book with the following image: ‘In this central andcentralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex powerrelations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of “incar-ceration”, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for thisstrategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle’ (1979: 308).

Foucault had already begun to reconsider this Nietzschean concep-tion of power by the time Discipline and Punish was published, however,




and in his courses from 1975 through 1979 he struggled to develop aconception of power adequate to the task of understanding the ways inwhich lives have been ordered in modernity.5 As he remarked in his1975–6 course:

It is obvious that everything I have said to you in previous years is inscribedwithin the struggle-repression schema. . . . Now, as I tried to apply it, I waseventually forced to reconsider it; both because, in many respects, it is stillinsufficiently elaborated – I would even go so far as to say that it is notelaborated at all – and also because I think that the twin notions of ‘repres-sion’ and ‘war’ have to be considerably modified and ultimately, perhaps,abandoned. (2003: 17; and 1980c: 92)

With the introduction of the concept of bio-power in the first volumeof The History of Sexuality (1976[1980a]), Foucault clearly movedbeyond the repressive and militaristic conceptions of power. By bio-power he was referring to a positive, productive form of power thatdoes not so much restrict or limit dangerous activity, as promote orfacilitate socially valuable behavior. This positive form of power doesnot operate primarily through laws or interdictions issued by sovereignauthority, but works instead through the dissemination of standards andnorms derived from the study of populations by the ‘human sciences’and other surveillance techniques.

In describing the historical emergence of bio-power Foucault focusedon the relation between death and power, and presented it as the culmi-nation of a gradual reversal of the traditional form of power that hadbeen exercised by medieval sovereigns. ‘For a long time,’ claimedFoucault, ‘one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was theright to decide life and death’ (1980a: 135). But in that period betweenthe Renaissance and the 19th century, which he called the ‘Classical Age’,the sovereign’s seemingly absolute right to kill subjects took a ‘consider-ably diminished form’ as liberal political theory established limits on theexercise of sovereign power. Death could be inflicted directly on subjectsonly as a punishment for injuries or threats to the sovereign, and couldbe inflicted indirectly when the sovereign compelled subjects to risk theirlives in his defense. Since the classical age, however, a ‘very profoundtransformation of these mechanisms of power’ has occurred:

This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifestedas simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, ordevelop its life. . . . But this formidable power of death . . . now presentsitself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life,that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it toprecise controls and comprehensive regulations. (1980a: 136–7)

With the emergence of this positive, non-repressive form of power, deathcould be directly or indirectly inflicted by the state only to the extent




that it promoted the life and interests of the social body, rather thanthose of the sovereign or state. Power was no longer manifestedprimarily through the sporadic, ceremonial imposition of death, but wasinstead exercised in a more constant manner through the shaping of theminds and bodies of individuals by the acquisition and disseminationof knowledge in disciplines like psychology, sociology, criminology,psychiatry and, especially, medicine.

Although Foucault’s only sustained treatment of medicine waspublished very early in his career, in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archae-ology of Medical Perception (1963[1973a]), he was nevertheless keenlyaware of the role that medicine played in the network of power relationsthat he uncovered in the late 1970s. As he put it in a 1976 interview:

Medical power is at the heart of the society of normalization. Its effectscan be seen everywhere: in the family, in schools, in factories, in courts oflaw, on the subject of sexuality, education, work, crime. Medicine has takenon a general social function: it infiltrates law, it plugs into it, it makes itwork. A sort of juridico-medical complex is presently being constituted,which is the major form of power. (1996b: 197)

And while The Birth of the Clinic has been accurately characterized asthe ‘most neglected of Foucault’s works’ (Jones and Porter, 1994: 31,also 12; and Armstrong, 1997: 19–20),6 this early examination ofmedicine fits quite well with his later claims about bio-power. For justas bio-power emerged out of a transformation in the relationshipbetween power and death, Foucault revealed in The Birth of the Clinicthat the normalizing power of modern medicine also developed out ofa fundamental reorientation in the relationship between medical knowl-edge and death.

Prior to the 19th century, Foucault claimed, the ‘knowledge of lifewas based on the essence of living’ and ‘an immemorial slope as old asmen’s fear turned the eyes of doctors towards the elimination of disease,towards cure, towards life’ (1973a: 145–6). Around the turn of thecentury, however, the ‘great break in the history of Western medicine’occurred as physicians directed their gaze at that ‘great dark threat inwhich [the doctor’s] knowledge and skill were abolished’ – death(1973a: 146). Foucault attributed the birth of this ‘anatomico-clinicalgaze’ to Marie-François-Xavier Bichat, who posed the following chal-lenge to his fellow physicians:

. . . for twenty years, from morning to night, you have taken notes atpatients’ bedsides on affections of the heart, the lungs, and the gastricviscera, and all is confusion for you in the symptoms which, refusing toyield up their meaning, offer you a succession of incoherent phenomena.Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that obser-vation alone could not dissipate. (quoted in Foucault, 1973a: 146)




Dissections had, of course, been carried out in splendid fashion duringthe Renaissance, as celebrated anatomists like Vesalius and Fallopiusperformed in lavish public anatomy theaters, revealing features ofhuman anatomy that had been obscured by the lasting influence ofclassical Galenic medical theory. But what Bichat was proposing at theturn of the 19th century was something altogether different than a struc-tural anatomy that mapped the venal, nervous, muscular, skeletal andorgan systems; rather, he called for a pathological anatomy that tracedthe course of disease throughout the dead body.

Bichat himself contributed to structural anatomy by breaking thesevarious systems and organs down into even more basic components,and identifying 21 different tissues that constitute the structure of thebody, providing ‘the concrete forms of its unity’ (Foucault, 1973a: 128).But Bichat’s primary interest was in studying how disease affected theseconstitutive tissues and spread throughout the body by way of them. Infollowing the course of disease throughout the body, Bichat alsodiscovered that death itself was not an event that occurred at a singlepoint in time, but instead ‘has a teeming presence that analysis maydivide into time and space’. Pathological anatomy revealed that death,or the process of mortification, begins well before the complete deathof the organism, and ‘long after the death of the individual, minuscule,partial deaths continue to dissociate the islets of life that still subsist’(Foucault, 1973a: 142). This novel conception of death as somethingtemporally and spatially divisible initially caused serious epistemologi-cal problems for medicine, due to the confusion it introduced betweenthe spatio-temporal course of disease, on the one hand, and that ofdeath, on the other. ‘If the traces of the disease happened to bite intothe corpse,’ Foucault explained, ‘then no evidence could distinguishabsolutely between what belonged to it and what to death; their signsintersected in indecipherable disorder’ (Foucault, 1973a: 141).

Bichat responded to this epistemological problem by subjecting theprocess of death to an even more focused gaze in his Recherches phys-iologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800), which was ‘the first large scaleexperimental, physiological examination of death’ (Ackerknecht, 1968:21–2). In this work he not only distinguished ‘organic’ and ‘animal’ life(i.e. vegetative and conscious life, respectively), and noted that theformer could continue after the expiration of the latter, but he alsoidentified three different sites from which death could begin: the heart,brain, and lungs (Ackerknecht, 1968: 21–3). With this anatomicalillumination of the mortification process, death was no longer some-thing beyond life and medicine – the great dark Other – but was instead‘turned for the first time into a technical instrument that provides agrasp on the truth of life and the nature of its illness. Death [became]the great analyst that shows the connexions by unfolding them, and




bursts open the wonders of genesis in the rigour of decomposition: and’,Foucault insisted, ‘the word decomposition must be allowed to staggerunder the weight of its meaning’ (Foucault, 1973a: 144). Once deathwas dissected, the nature of disease also underwent a significant trans-formation. Like death, disease had been seen as something exterior andthreatening to life, and for centuries had been linked to a ‘metaphysicof evil’ (Foucault, 1973a: 196). After the pathological-anatomical gazewas directed through the corpse, however, disease was no longerapproached as the negation of health, but instead became a positivelyknown phenomenon. ‘[S]een in relation to death,’ Foucault noted,‘disease becomes exhaustively legible, open without remainder to thesovereign dissection of language and of the gaze’ (1973a: 196).

Foucault’s account of the origins of modern medicine stands in starkcontrast to those in the medical community and elsewhere who todayrespond to the assertion of the right to die by claiming that medicine isconcerned solely with the preservation of life, and cannot possiblyembrace death. On the contrary, Foucault emphasized that modernmedicine, unlike its predecessors, was grounded precisely in a positiverelation to death:

It will no doubt remain a decisive fact about our culture, that its first scien-tific discourse concerning the individual had to pass through this stage ofdeath. Western man could constitute himself in his own eyes as an objectof science, he grasped himself within his language, and gave himself, inhimself and by himself, a discursive existence, only in the opening createdby his own elimination. (1973a: 197; also 144)

And beyond grounding the medical gaze, Foucault also recognized thatthe anatomical illumination of death provided an epistemological modelfor all those sciences that objectify ‘man’. As he put it,

. . . positive medicine marked, at the empirical level, the beginning of thatfundamental relation that binds modern man to his original finitude.Hence, the fundamental place of medicine in the overall architecture of thehuman sciences. . . . This is because medicine offers modern man the obsti-nate, yet reassuring face of his finitude; in it, death is endlessly repeated,but it is also exorcized; and although it ceaselessly reminds man of the limitthat he bears within him, it also speaks to him of that technical world thatis the armed, positive, full form of his finitude. (1973a: 197–8)

So as sovereign power turned away from the threat of death and thescaffold in the early-modern period and gave way to a positive form ofpower that administered life, medicine assumed a crucial role in theexercise of this new form of power by turning toward death to establisha foundation for the human sciences that underlie bio-power.7 However,what seems to be missing from Foucault’s account of this shiftingrelationship between power, medicine and death is some indication of




the individual’s subjective experience of death. But it would certainly bea mistake to limit what he has to say about death in The Birth of theClinic to an archaeological treatment of discursive practices. Beyond theobjectification of human being, Foucault was also acutely, if elliptically,aware of the role that the anatomical understanding of death played inthe constitution of the self-consciousness of modern individuals. In fact,he offered in this early text a description of the modern relation betweendeath and self-consciousness that sounded very much like Heidegger’sdescription of an authentic, existential experience of death in Beingand Time: ‘It is in that perception of death that the individual findshimself, escaping from a monotonous, average life; in the slow, half-subterranean, but already visible approach of death, the dull, commonlife becomes an individuality at last; a black border isolates it and givesit the style of its own truth’ (1973a: 171; emphasis added; cf. Heidegger,1962: 299–311).

Although Foucault did not explore the subjective dimensions of thisblack border in The Birth of the Clinic, he did mention certain pathsthat he would investigate more fully later in his career. For instance, helinked death with eroticism and noted the contemporaneity of Bichatand Sade, and also mentioned in passing several artistic and literarymanifestations of that 19th-century voice that spoke ‘obstinately ofdeath’ (1973a: 171).8 Without developing any of these themes, Foucaultintimated that the opening of the discursive space of the corpse power-fully influenced the subjectivization, as well as the objectification, ofhuman subjects. Indeed, he concluded The Birth of the Clinic byproclaiming that ‘[g]enerally speaking, the experience of individualityin modern culture is bound up with that of death’ (1973a: 197). Alongwith these important changes in medicine and sovereignty that Foucaultidentified as occurring around the turn of the 19th century, there wasalso an earlier preparatory transformation in the modern subject’sstance toward death, but this occurred in a realm that Foucault wasreluctant to consider either early or late in his career – the domain ofclassical liberal political theory.

Foucault’s dismissal of Hobbes

One might expect that early-modern political theory would play animportant role in Foucault’s account of the emergence of bio-power,since liberalism helped limit the scope of the sovereign’s power byshifting the foundation of power from the monarch to the subjects.However, liberalism never questioned the essential principle of the‘juridical-political code’ of the king, which held ‘that power always hadto be exercised in the form of law’ (1980a: 86, 88). Furthermore, by




focusing primarily on the juridical relation between individual bearersof rights, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, liberalism maskedthe ways in which the subject was shaped and incited to act through thewide variety of non-legal disciplines, institutions and techniques thatconstitute bio-power. Consequently, Foucault generally ignored thedominant figures of 17th-century liberalism, but he was emphaticallydismissive of Hobbes. In fact, in his discussion of the classical sover-eign’s mitigated power of life and death in The History of Sexuality,Foucault asked, ‘Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer tothe prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defendhis life even if this meant the death of others?’ (1980a: 135). And heanswered that question in the résumé of the course he offered at theCollège de France in the winter of the same year, 1975–6: ‘We mustbegin by ruling out certain false paternities. Especially Hobbes’ (2003:270; for alternative translations, see 1997c: 63; and 1980d: 18).

Although Foucault never offered any sustained criticism of Hobbes,some insight into his difficulty with him is provided by the publishedclass lectures and résumés from the mid- to late 1970s, when Foucaultwas trying to articulate a conception of power that went beyond boththe traditional terms of the juridical subject, as well as the Nietzscheanalternative that he had embraced.9 In his attempt to develop a concep-tion of power adequate to modernity, Foucault was most bothered notby Hobbes’ classic articulation of the juridical, rights-bearing subject,as one might expect; rather, it was his claims about the warlike state ofnature that led Foucault to declare Hobbes a false paternity. In his1975–6 course Foucault was tracing the lineage of the militaristicconception of power through figures like Lilburne, Coke, Boulainvilliersand Du Buat-Nancay, all of whom evoked passionate memories ofspecific historical conflicts and sought to rejoin those ancient strugglesas the foundation of their political thought (2003: 267–2). OnFoucault’s reading, Hobbes was an adversary of such ‘political histori-cism’ in general, and of the use to which the Norman Conquest wasbeing put by other 17th-century English theorists, in particular (2003:98, 110–11). It was in this context that Foucault declared:

What Hobbes calls the war of every man against every man is no sense areal historical war, but a play of presentations that allows every man toevaluate the threat that every man represents to him, to evaluate thewillingness of others to fight, and to assess the risk that he himself wouldrun if he resorted to force. Sovereignty . . . is established not by the fact ofwarlike domination but, on the contrary, by a calculation that makes itpossible to avoid war. For Hobbes, it is nonwar that founds the State andgives it its form. (2003: 270, also 92; cf. 1997c: 63; and 1980d: 18)

Foucault was certainly correct in excluding Hobbes from the line ofthought he was examining in this course; for Hobbes, the first law of




nature was ‘to seek Peace, and follow it’ (Hobbes, 1962: 104). However,two years later, in 1978, Foucault once again took up Hobbes in thewell-known lecture ‘Governmentality’. Here the context was not aninvestigation of the origins of the militaristic conception of power, butrather an examination of the larger historical shift from sovereignty togovernmentality. Although this is the same context as the conclusion ofthe first volume of The History of Sexuality, where Foucault firstdismissed Hobbes, in this instance he was somewhat more generous andnuanced in his explanation of Hobbes’ limited relevance for understand-ing governmentality:

This art of government tried, so to speak, to reconcile itself with the theoryof sovereignty by attempting to derive the ruling principles of an art ofgovernment from a renewed version of the theory of sovereignty – and thisis where those seventeenth-century jurists come into the picture who formal-ize or ritualize the theory of the contract. . . . But although contract theory,with its reflection on the relationship between ruler and subjects, played avery important role in theories of public law, in practice, as is evidenced bythe case of Hobbes (even though what Hobbes was aiming to discover wasthe ruling principles of an art of government), it remained at the stage ofthe formulation of general principles of public law. (1991: 98)

From Foucault’s perspective, therefore, Hobbes was at best a classicaltheorist of sovereignty who was on the way toward governmentality,and was at worst an opponent of the warlike conception of power thatwas developed by other early-modern theorists. In either context,Foucault found Hobbes to be of little value and discouraged any seriousconsideration of his role in laying the foundation of modern forms ofpower. However, I think Foucault overlooked certain dimensions ofHobbes’ thought that not only illuminate the relation between deathand power in modernity, but also complement Foucault’s own analysisof this relationship in interesting ways. For one of the insights providedby Foucault’s reconceptualization of power was that ‘rather than askingideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surren-dered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look athow relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects’ (2003: 265; cf.1997c: 59; and 1980d: 15). Even though Foucault explicitly emphasizedthat this process of subjugation would be ‘precisely the opposite of whatHobbes was trying to do in Leviathan’ (2003: 28; cf. 1980c: 97–8), myadmittedly presumptuous claim is that Hobbes is most illuminatingprecisely in regard to this manufacturing of subjects. Indeed, I will arguethat the Hobbesian subject is perfectly suited, if not a prerequisite, forthe exercise of bio-power in a system of governmentality. In order toreveal Hobbes’ crucial contribution to the juridico-medical complex ofmodernity we must look rather closely at Leviathan (1651), but ourprimary concern is not ‘to discover how a multiplicity of individuals




and wills can be shaped into a single will or even a single body that issupposedly animated by a soul known as sovereignty’, which is whatFoucault found to be the import of Leviathan (2003: 29; cf. 1980c:97–8). Rather, our concern is to trace in Hobbes’ political thought theinscription of such rights in the ‘multiple peripheral bodies, the bodiesthat are constituted as subjects by power-effects’ (2003: 29; cf. 1980c:98). In other words, we will follow Foucault’s advice to cut off the headof the king more closely than he himself did (1980b: 121), and readLeviathan in terms of subjects rather than sovereigns.

Bio-power and the Hobbesian subject

In Hobbes’ well-known state of nature, individuals were constantly atrisk of losing their lives in a violent confrontation due to two funda-mental features of the Hobbesian subject – its natural right to dowhatever it thought would promote its life (1962: 103), and the roughmental and physical equality that existed among subjects in this state ofnature (1962: 98–9).10 Because of their natural parity, no individual inthis state had such an advantage that it could hope to intimidate anotherinto forfeiting its natural right to anything it desired. Consequently,when individuals in this state came to desire a common object theybecame competitors, and this natural competition was intensified by thepassions, primarily vanity,11 and turned into a life-and-death struggle.It is because of the interplay of these features of the subject – its naturalright and equality, as well as its vanity – that Hobbes concluded thestate of nature was a state of war, ‘every man, against every man’ (1962:101; also 100, 103). What I would like to stress about Hobbes’ state ofnature, however, is not simply its constant threat of violence, but ratherthe fact that this violence very poignantly raised the issue of humanmortality, and that it did so in a temporal context. One of the problemsor ‘incommodities’ of the state of nature, to use Hobbes’ term, was thatthe lives of people in that state tended to be of short duration. In hisfamous description of life in this state, Hobbes said it is ‘solitary, poor,nasty, brutish, and short’ (1962: 100; emphasis added), and at anotherpoint in the text he said that in the state of natural equality ‘there canbe no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of livingout the time, which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live’ (1962: 103).So in Hobbes’ state of nature people not only died violently, but prema-turely as well.

While I agree with Foucault’s observation that the founding of theHobbesian state was actually a choice to avoid war, I think he passeda little too quickly over Hobbes’ account of the transition from the stateof nature to civil society. For Hobbes claimed that the possibility of




leaving the natural state of war was grounded ‘partly in the [subject’s]passions, partly in his reason’ (1962: 102), and like the state of nature,these passions and reason were imbued with a sense of mortality. Reasonhelped lead out of the state of nature by revealing to the subject naturallaws which acted as limitations on the exercise of the natural right todo and take whatever one wanted. In his discussion of the laws ofnature, Hobbes offered a generic definition of such laws which wassurprisingly specific:

A LAW OF NATURE, lex naturalis, is a precept or general rule, found outby reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that, which is destructive ofhis life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that,by which he thinketh it may be best preserved. (1962: 103)

In general, therefore, a law of nature was not just an obligation or limi-tation that humans naturally recognize; it was rather a limitation on thefundamental right to do what one thought would best preserve one’slife. According to the very idea of natural law one could not reasonablyexercise this right in a manner that would actually lead to one’s death,and furthermore one must do, or as Hobbes put it, one was forbiddento omit doing, that which one thought would best preserve or prolongone’s life.

In comparison with its Stoic predecessor, Hobbes’ conception of thenatural law of self-preservation was uniquely modern. For Hobbes, theprimary objective of this law of nature was to preserve physical,corporeal existence, while the Stoics were concerned with preservingsomething other than the body. This distinction becomes clear when onecompares Hobbes’ corporeal conception of self-preservation withCicero’s description of the Stoic doctrine of self-love:

[S]ince love of self is implanted by nature in all men, both the foolish andthe wise alike will choose what is in accordance with nature and reject thecontrary. . . . When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance ofthings in accordance with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive;when he possesses or sees in prospect a majority of the contrary things, itis appropriate for him to depart from life. . . . And very often it is appro-priate for the Wise Man to abandon life at a moment when he is enjoyingsupreme happiness, if an opportunity offers for making a timely exit. Forthe Stoic view is that happiness, which means life in harmony with nature,is a matter of seizing the right moment. So that Wisdom her very self uponoccasion bids the Wise Man to leave her. (1967: III, 60–1, 279–81)

For the Stoics, the law of self-preservation or self-love did not precludethe possibility of sacrificing one’s life in order to preserve one’s virtueor tranquility, but as we will see, for Hobbes there was never a goodreason to abandon one’s life. (I will discuss this Stoic willingness tochoose death over life in more detail later in this article.)




Given Hobbes’ corporeal conception of the law of nature, Foucaultappears correct in describing Hobbesian subjects as calculative beingswho were rationally inclined to avoid war, and not the aggressive, belli-cose individuals so often ascribed to Hobbes. However, the depiction ofthe potential for violence in nature indicates that there was certainlymuch more to the Hobbesian subject than reason alone. Some passions,such as vanity, could cause individuals to ignore the dictates of reasonand put their lives at risk, but there were certain other passions thatcould come to the aid of reason at such dangerous moments, and helppromote peace. Foremost among these peace-keeping passions was thefear of violent death (1962: 100).12 For once the Hobbesian subjectengaged in and survived the life-and-death struggle that erupted out ofmaterial competition, it became terrifyingly aware of the implicationsof such struggles. Leo Strauss’ gloss on the fear of death in Hobbes’theory is instructive here: ‘The struggle for pre-eminence, about“trifles”, has become a life-and-death struggle. In this way natural manhappens unforeseen upon the danger of death; in this way he comes toknow this primary and greatest and supreme evil in the moment of beingirresistibly driven to fall back before death in order to struggle for hislife’ (1952: 20–1).13 This face-to-face confrontation with the possibilityof a violent death was, according to Strauss, ‘the passion which bringsman to reason’ (1952: 18).

Strauss’ emphasis on the terrifying fear of a violent death is appro-priate for explaining the transition from the state of nature into civilsociety, but I want to emphasize that the more moderate and persistentfear of a premature death was crucial in supporting ‘the foresight oftheir own preservation’ that Hobbes identified as ‘[t]he final cause, end,or design of men . . . in the introduction of that restraint upon them-selves, in which we see them live in commonwealths’ (1962: 129). Forafter civil society succeeded, however imperfectly, in eliminating thethreat of violence from the lives of certain populations, it was the fearof a premature death that rendered individuals responsive to the manyshifting strategies of self-preservation that were, and continue to be,developed and deployed in the juridico-medical order of modernity.Indeed, from my perspective the most notable feature of Hobbes’ politi-cal theory is not the tension Strauss identified between base vanity andthe justified fear of a violent death (1952: 18), but rather the dynamicrelationship between the rational pursuit of self-preservation and themore mundane, tepid fear of a premature death. For such Hobbesiansubjects could be counted upon to take whatever steps were required todefer death and prolong their lives, and were precisely the sort of indi-viduals who were fit for the exercise of bio-power. As modern medicineproduced new knowledge and techniques for maintaining and preserv-ing life, these subjects could be counted onto quickly, and without any




coercion, alter their behavior and habits according to these newstandards.

Hobbes himself lived his life largely in accordance with this objec-tive of deferring death as long as possible. Aside from his notoriousflight to France during the Civil Wars, which could be justified by thefear of a violent death, Hobbes also governed himself on a daily basisaccording to the fear of a premature death, and took the preservationof his health as a serious personal responsibility. His health had beenpoor until he reached the age of 40, but at that point he began follow-ing a strict regimen, and enjoyed generally good health for the next fivedecades of his long life (Aubrey, 1898: I, 347). Hobbes’ regimen wasbased on the idea, quite common in the 17th century, that as people agethey come to have too much moisture and not enough heat, and conse-quently his regimen consisted primarily of vigorous exercise thatproduced a ‘great sweat’. According to one first-hand account, Hobbes’‘profess’d Rule of Health was to dedicate the Morning to his Health,and the Afternoon to his Studies. And therefore, at his first rising hewalk’d out and climb’d any Hill within his reach; or if the Weather wasnot dry, he fatigued himself within doors, by some Exercise or other tobe in a Sweat’ (quoted in Rogow, 1986: 226). And John Aubrey, alifelong admirer who dedicated far more space to Hobbes’ life than anyother of his Brief Lives, noted that ‘[b]esides his dayly walking,[Hobbes] did twice or thrice a yeare play at tennis (at about 75 he didit)’. After such exercise, Hobbes’ routine was to ‘then give the servantsome money to rubbe him’. According to Aubrey, the reason Hobbesregularly engaged in sweaty exercise and rubdowns was because these‘he did believe would make him live two or three yeares the longer’(1898: I, 351). And he not only vigorously exercised to extend his life,but also sang in this manner for the same reason:

He had alwayes bookes of prick-song lyeing on his table . . . which at night,when he was abed, and the dores made fast, and was sure nobody heardhim, he sang aloud (not that he had a very good voice) but for his health’ssake: he did beleeve it did his lunges good, and conduced much to prolonghis life. (Aubrey, 1898: I, 352)

Hobbes’ personal behavior in regard to his health, as well as histheoretical portrayal of a rational subject that is governed by the fear ofdeath, may appear unexceptional today. After all, one of the distinctivefeatures of modern culture is the tremendous extension of human lifeexpectancy that has been accomplished largely through the developmentof medical knowledge and techniques. Reasonable individuals have beeneager participants in this modern project of death deferral, and remainexceedingly concerned about their health and quite willing to spend timeand money to follow the latest regimental advice disseminated by




medical and fitness authorities. Indeed, in regard to the prevailing stancetoward death and health, it seems fair to say that we are all Hobbesiannow. However, it is important to note that this stance toward death assomething fearsome, which should be deferred as long as possible,marks a crucial divergence from the long trace of the western philo-sophical and religious tradition. In general, death had been portrayedin that moral tradition as a passage to another, more important realmoutside of time (Epicurus being a notable exception to this rule). FromPlato – who had Socrates proclaim in the Phaedo that ‘as the truephilosophers are ever studying death, to them, of all men, death is theleast terrible’ (1973: 499) – to Calvin – who claimed that Christiansshould ‘ardently long for death, and constantly meditate upon it’ (1845:II, 290) – death was treated not as something to be feared and avoidedat any cost, but as something that a truly virtuous person would gladlyembrace when honor or faith required it.14 This willingness to sacrificeone’s life was, of course, an ideal that few would ever attain, but themoral heroes of the western tradition, from Socrates to Thomas More,were martyrs of one sort or another. For Hobbes, in contrast, martyr-dom was a particularly vexing issue.

Although Hobbes did not discuss the possibility of immortality inthe first two parts of Leviathan, in the third part, ‘Of a ChristianCommonwealth’, he recognized that there was something beyond thelimit of death. Such recognition, of course, opened up the politicallydisruptive possibility of martyrdom, and Hobbes went to great lengthsto minimize the problems posed by this traditional ideal. At one pointhe conceded that if the sovereign issued a command that ‘cannot beobeyed, without [the subject] being damned to eternal death, then itwere madness to obey it’ (1962: 424). However, such a voluntary relin-quishment of one’s time on earth flew in the face of Hobbes’ dictumthat people can, and should, do anything possible to save their earthlylives, so he offered a lesson to help believers ‘to distinguish well betweenwhat is, and what is not necessary to eternal salvation’. Hobbes’conclusion was that ‘[a]ll that is NECESSARY to salvation is containedin two virtues, faith in Christ, and obedience to Laws’ (1962: 425).While this lesson still left open the possibility of the law’s demandingthat a person renounce his or her faith, Hobbes counseled sovereignsagainst ever putting their subjects in a position where they would haveto choose between saving their earthly or their immortal lives. And inregard to the subjects, Hobbes claimed that as ‘for their faith, it isinternal, and invisible; they have the licence that Naaman had, and neednot put themselves into danger for it’ (1962: 436). So even if an ‘infidelsovereign’ was foolish enough to demand of his or her subjects that theyrenounce their faith, Hobbes argued that Christian subjects did not needto die for that faith, but only maintain their inner, invisible belief.




Hobbes’ position on martyrdom, like his concern with health andlongevity, has left its mark on modern western subjects, as even thosewho profess religious faith today respond with incredulity to thegrowing number of young Islamic men and women who are eager todie for their faith in the struggle against the infidel West.

In Leviathan, and in Hobbes’ personal behavior, there is no vestigeof that traditional longing for death that Plato urged on philosophers,Calvin urged on Christians, and some radical mullahs urge today onIslamists. Indeed, I would like to suggest, Foucault’s objections notwith-standing, that the Hobbesian subject was a harbinger of precisely thesort of health-conscious, death-deferring individuals that would beproduced and governed by bio-power. In the 17th century, however, theHobbesian subject was a radical and disturbing image, due to thecontroversy that surrounded the very meaning of the natural law of self-preservation upon which Hobbes, as well as other liberal philosophers,grounded their conceptions of rational individuality. This controversyis revealed most clearly in regard to an issue that was even more disturb-ing than martyrdom for 17th-century liberals – suicide.

Hobbes and the 17th-century suicide debate

In general, attitudes toward suicide in early-modern Europe were shapedby the traditional Christian condemnation of the termination of one’sown life as the sin of ‘self-murder’. This tradition began with Augus-tine’s determination in the 5th century that the taking of one’s lifeviolated the biblical injunction against murder (Augustine, 1948: 27–34;also 474–8). In the 6th century suicides were denied Christian burialrights, and in the 13th century they could no longer be buried inhallowed ground (Williams, 1966: 257–8; also see Alvarez, 1990: 89;and Fedden, 1972: 133–4). Over the course of the Middle Ages thepunishments grew more severe as ignominious burial practices, derivedfrom pre-Christian folklore, were added to the religious sanctions. Thesedegrading additions varied from region to region, but they usually hadto do with the liminal aspect of the suicide, who had chosen to abandonthe community of the living but was denied entry into the communityof the dead. The ghosts of these unfortunate individuals were thoughtto be ‘on an eternally unfinished journey . . . [and] were believed to berestless and malevolent’ (MacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 47). InEngland, for instance, the bodies of suicides were sometimes hung ongibbets and allowed to rot. More frequently, the naked body was buriedat night, face down in a grave dug in a highway or a crossroads, and awooden stake was driven through the body pinning it to that spot.Various interpretations of the significance of such roadside burials have




been offered, such as beliefs that constant traffic would help to keep theghost down, or the ghost would become confused by the various roads,or the sign of the cross would help dispel any evil energy emanatingfrom the corpse of the suicide. In France and Germany suicides wereoften dragged through the streets to a place of execution, where theywere hung on chains and left to rot, and in some parts of France thebodies were burned or tossed on public refuse heaps. In certain cities,such as Metz and Strasburg, the bodies were placed in barrels and setadrift down rivers (Williams, 1966: 257–61; Fedden, 1972: 139–41;MacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 15–19; Alvarez, 1990: 64–5; Crocker,1952: 50; and Noon, 1978: 372).

Along with this degrading treatment of the body of the suicide, theMiddle Ages also saw the emergence of the legal punishment of thesuicide’s heirs through forfeiture laws that confiscated some, if not all,of the suicide’s property. In England, if a death was suspected of beinga suicide the coroner was required to convene a jury of local citizens toposthumously determine whether the individual was guilty of felo de se(literally, a felony of oneself), or was non compos mentis (not of soundmind), and therefore not subject to punishment. If the verdict was felode se not only was the body denied a Christian burial, but that person’s‘moveable goods, including tools, household items, money, debts owedto them, and even leases on the land that they had worked were forfeitedto the crown or to the holder of a royal patent who possessed the rightto such windfalls in a particular place’ (MacDonald and Murphy, 1990:15–18; also see Williams, 1966: 261–4; and Fedden, 1972: 137–9). InFrance as well, the property of the suicide was confiscated by the Crown,and this practice, along with the degrading burial practices, was codifiedin the Ordonnance criminelle de 1670, which ‘for the first time groupedsuicide with the major crimes of heresy and lèse-majesté’ (Crocker,1952: 50; also see Alvarez, 1990: 65–6; and Fedden, 1972: 190–2).These legal punishments of suicide lasted well into the modern period.In England, the last recorded ignominious burial of a suicide occurredin 1823, although the forfeiture law remained in place until 1870(Alvarez, 1990: 64–6; Williams, 1966: 259–62; and Fedden, 1972: 141,192–3). The French law against suicide remained in effect until 1770,when the degradations of the body were abolished and proper burialsallowed for suicides, and the forfeiture laws lapsed with the Revolution(Fedden, 1972: 223).

Although these various medieval punishments of suicide were avail-able throughout the early-modern period, they were not uniformlyimposed from the 16th through the 18th centuries. In Sleepless Souls:Suicide in Early Modern England, Michael MacDonald and Terence R.Murphy claim that these punishments were infrequently employed priorto 1500, but that ‘[t]he rigour with which the law against suicide was




enforced in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries distinguishesthis period from the centuries before and afterwards’ (1990: 16). Theyidentify the period between 1500 and 1660 as the ‘era of severity’ inthe punishment of suicide, and note that after that point suicide became‘secularized’, and the frequency and severity of the punishments dimin-ished throughout the 18th century until the legal punishments wereultimately repealed. Although MacDonald and Murphy’s study focuseson England, the pattern they identify is generally true for much ofEurope. As Lester Crocker noted, ‘seventeenth-century France, in thetotality of its attitude, severely condemned suicide’, but in the 18thcentury this hostility began to flag (1952: 224–7).

Hobbes’ political theory emerged toward the end of the era ofseverity, but his position on suicide was actually a precursor of the morelenient attitude that would eventually prevail throughout Europe. Infact, the Oxford English Dictionary claims that the word ‘suicide’ firstappeared as a less pejorative alternative to self-murder in 1651, the yearLeviathan was published.15 To appreciate the prescience of Hobbes’stance toward suicide, one must have some sense of the larger discur-sive context in which the practice was addressed. From the 16th throughthe 18th centuries, philosophers, clerics, essayists and learned gentlemenwere engaged in a very heated debate about suicide, although the termsof this debate shifted over time. During the late 16th and 17th centuries,when the punitive attitude waxed throughout Europe, suicide wasdiscussed primarily in terms of the natural law of self-preservation,while in the 18th century, as the punishments of suicide waned, theterms of the debate shifted to self-ownership. The conceptual shift fromself-preservation to self-ownership is beyond the scope of this article,however.16 My concern here lies primarily with the unique position thatHobbes’ conception of corporeal self-preservation held in the early-modern suicide debate. To provide a sense of the significance of Hobbes’contribution to this debate, I will contrast two of the earliest sustainedarguments for and against suicide that appeared in the 17th century,and then position Hobbes in relation to these other voices.

In 1637 the Puritan cleric John Sym published the first full-lengthEnglish treatise against suicide, Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killingor, An Useful Treatise Concerning Life and Self-Murder, in response towhat he perceived as a suicide epidemic that was sweeping acrossEngland (Sym, 1988: unpaginated preface; also see Fedden, 1972:183–5; and Sprott, 1961: 30). In his extensive argument Sym relied quiteheavily on Augustine’s claim that the Fifth Commandment prohibitedthe murder of oneself as well as others, but he combined this traditionaljudgment with the natural law of self-preservation, corporeally under-stood, and concluded that self-murder was more heinous than any othercrime, including the murder of another:




Here is now the speciall difference of this sort of murder, wherby it tran-scends, and is distinguished from all other murders; and consists in restraintof the act of killing, in regard of its individual object, to a mans own life& self; which is the greatest and cruellest act of hostility in the world: whena man, who by nature is most bound to preserve himselfe, reflects uponhimselfe, to destroy himselfe; the horriblenes whereof is so monstrous, thatwe read no law made against it, as if it were a thing not to bee supposedpossible. And this sinne of all others is most against the Law of nature, forthat self-preservation, armes a man to turne upon others, unlawfullyinvading him to kill him. (1988: 53–4)

Beyond outlawing the conscious taking of one’s own life, which heidentified as ‘direct self-murder’, Sym also used the natural law of self-preservation to condemn the much broader category of ‘indirect self-murder’, which he defined as the intentional pursuit of some good bymeans that expose one to mortal danger ‘without any respect, or expec-tation of death thereupon ensuing’ (1988: 85–6). He further divided thiscategory of indirect self-murder into deaths that occurred due tocommission, such as the excessive use of food or drink, or associationwith dangerous individuals, and deaths that resulted from omission,such as refusals of necessary medicine or surgery, or refusals to flee fromavoidable dangers (1988: 91–100). This category of indirect self-murderinvolves behavioral requirements that were very much like those Hobbesfollowed in his personal life, such as taking care of his health and fleeingthe Civil Wars, but there is an important difference in the justificationHobbes and Sym relied upon to support such behavior. For Sym wouldhave his readers avoid dangerous commissions and omissions in orderto escape the sin of self-murder, thereby preserving their souls, whileHobbes followed such advice on the basis of his rational commitmentto the natural law of self-preservation, and the desire to add a few yearsto his earthly life. In other words, Sym’s embrace of corporeal self-preservation involved a tension with his other-worldly commitments,while Hobbes’ embrace of this concept was free from any such tension.

Although Sym’s hostility to suicide was indicative of the punitiveattitude that prevailed in the 16th and 17th centuries, there were at thattime a few voices raised in opposition to the punishment of self-murder.In the late 16th century Montaigne published essays that endorsed someprominent Roman suicides (one of which I will briefly discuss at the endof this article), but the first treatise-length defense of suicide was writtenin 1608 by John Donne, a young poet but not yet cleric, under theunwieldy title of Biathanatos: A Declaration of that Paradoxe, orThesis, that Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may neverbe otherwise. This work is divided into three parts, each of which dealswith a specific type of law that might be used to ground the prohibi-tion against suicide: the law of nature; the law of reason; and finally,




the law of God. Only the first part concerns us here, and in regard tothe natural law Donne ‘confessed’ that self-preservation was its foun-dation, but he also noted that as it applied to humans this law was nota simple matter (1930: 49). According to Donne, natural law wascomprised of two separate yet related elements, which he identified asthe ‘sensitive’ and ‘rational’ laws of nature (1930: 38). The sensitive lawof nature is equivalent to corporeal self-preservation, and Donneclaimed that ‘it extends to beasts more then [sic] to us, because theycannot compare degrees of obligation and distinctions of duties andoffices, as we can’ (1930: 44–5). In humans, this sensitive dimension‘doth naturally lead and conduce to’ the rational dimension, which hedescribed as ‘that light which God hath afforded us of his eternall law;and which is usually called recta ratio. Now this law of nature . . . isonely in man and in him directed upon Piety, Religion, Sociablenesse;and such for as it reacheth to the preservation both of Species and indi-viduals’ (1930: 38, 39).

In regard to suicide, Donne assumed that the natural law argumentagainst the practice relied more upon the rational dimension than thesensitive. For he recognized that if the opposition to suicide wasgrounded in the sensitive, or corporeal, aspect of natural law, the impli-cations would indeed be much more radical than these opponents under-stood. ‘I think this is not the [sensitive] law of nature which theseabhorrers of SELF-HOMICIDE complaine to bee violated by that Act’,Donne argued. ‘For so they might as well accuse all discipline andausteritie, and affectation of Martyrdome, which are as contrarie to theLaw of sensitive Nature’ (1930: 39). Donne seems to have correctlyunderstood the implications of such a corporeal natural law argument,but he could not imagine that the abhorrers of suicide would go thatfar in their opposition. In fact, Sym did not follow the logic of corporealself-preservation to this conclusion, but explicitly excepted martyrdomfrom the prohibition against self-murder, and argued that ‘a man oughtto expose his life to death, in causes concerning religion . . . when a manis desired, commanded, or threatened to doe any sinne forbidden byGods word; that then hee doe it not, although he therefore doe die’(1988: 149; also see 149–52). As we saw earlier, however, Hobbes wasmuch less hesitant than Sym to fully embrace the consequences of thecorporeal conception of self-preservation, and explicitly challenged thetraditional ideal of martyrdom by arguing that no one ever need die fortheir faith.

Since Donne could not imagine that the sensitive law of naturewould be invoked to ground the prohibition of suicide, he concentratedon the rational law of nature, but found this an insufficient foundationas well. As he understood that dimension of natural law which appliedexclusively to humans, it actually imposed duties and obligations that




could, on occasion, cause individuals to neglect their own corporealpreservation, or that of the species. He cited celibacy as an example ofa morally appropriate choice for some individuals, even though such achoice hindered the preservation of the species (1930: 45). And far fromtreating martyrdom as an exception to the law of self-preservation, asSym did, or as a violation of that law, as Hobbes in effect did, Donneinstead argued that ‘the desire of Martyrdome, though the body perish,is a Self-preservation, because thereby out of our election our best partis advanc’d’ (1930: 49). By the same token, suicide could sometimes bethe best choice for an individual, if it would allow him or her to preservesomething higher than mere physical existence. In all these cases, Donneargued, ‘[t]he like danger is in deducing consequences from this naturallLaw, of Selfe-preservation; which doth not so rigorously, and urgently,and illimitedly binde, but that by the Law of Nature it selfe, things may,yea must neglect themselves for others’ (1930: 46).

Donne’s and Sym’s divergence over the issue of suicide is bestexplained not by any difference in their commitment to Christianity, butrather by their different interpretations of the natural law of self-preser-vation. Sym held a corporeal conception of self-preservation that wasvery close to that of Hobbes, although unlike Hobbes, he also tried tosimultaneously maintain the other-worldly ethos of Christianity. Suicidewas a violation of both scriptural and natural law, and Sym thereforecondemned it as the most heinous crime imaginable. However, Donne’sconception of the rational element of self-preservation was closer to thatof the Stoics and pre-modern Christians than it was to Hobbes. ForDonne, the preservation of the soul, or virtue, took precedence over themere prolongation of the life of the flesh, and consequently he couldendorse both self-preservation and suicide without contradiction, as didthe Stoics. Unfortunately, this traditional dimension of Biathanatos isoften overlooked by those who (over-)emphasize the individualistic andrelativistic dimensions of Donne’s book, and herald it as one of theearliest articulations of a uniquely modern stance toward suicide (e.g.Sprott, 1961: 23, also 20–1; Fedden, 1972: 182, 135–6; and Alvarez,1990: 176–7). On his own account, Donne wrote Biathanatos preciselyto challenge the modern, corporeal notion of self-preservation held bythose who attack suicide, as well as to comfort those who could not, ingood conscience, abide by the increasingly strident screeds against self-destruction that were generated by that concept:

I thought it therefore needfull, to oppose this defensative, as well to re-encourage men to a just contempt of this life, and to restore them to theirnature, which is a desire of supreame happiness in the next life by the lossof this, as also to rectify, and wash again their same, who religiouslyassuring themselves that in some cases, when wee were destitute of othermeanes, we might be to our selves the stewards of Gods benefits, and theMinisters of his mercifull Justice. (1930: 216)




Since Hobbes’ understanding of self-preservation was closer to Sym’sthan Donne’s, one might expect him to have shared Sym’s extremehostility toward self-murder, but surprisingly, he took a position onsuicide that was actually closer to that of Donne, although for verydifferent reasons than those offered in Biathanatos (see Stoffell, 1991:26–33; and MacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 141). Although Hobbesapparently considered suicide when he fell ill while finishing Leviathanin France (Stephen, 1904: 41),17 he did not spend much time discussingthis issue in that book, but simply declared that the law of self-preser-vation precluded the exercise of natural right in a manner that wouldcause one’s death. However, in A Dialogue Between a Philosopher anda Student of the Common Laws of England, which was written between1662 and 1675 and published posthumously in 1681, Hobbes discussedsuicide in the context of a conversation concerning felonies. When thelaw student claimed that not only the common law, but statutory lawas well, recognized suicide as felo de se, the philosopher responded bysaying:

I conceive not how any Man can bear Animum felleum, or so much Malicetowards himself, as to hurt himself voluntarily, much less to kill himself;for naturally, and necessarily the Intention of every Man aimeth atsomewhat, which is good to himself, and tendeth to his preservation: andtherefore, methinks, if he kill himself, it is to be presumed that he is notcompos mentis, but by some inward torment or Apprehension of somewhatworse than Death, Distracted. (1971: 116–17)

When the student replied that it was necessary to prove that individualswere compos mentis before they could be deemed felo de se, the philoso-pher wondered, ‘How can that be proved of a Man dead; especially ifit cannot be proved by any Witnesses, that a little before his death hespake as other men used to do. This is a hard place; and before youtake it for Common-Law it had need to be clear’d’ (1971: 117).

Hobbes’ lenient position on suicide, therefore, was distinct not onlyfrom Sym’s hostile stance, but from Donne’s moderate position as well.Given his non-corporeal conception of self-preservation, Donne couldallow that suicide might be a form of self-preservation in some circum-stances, but for Hobbes suicide was clearly a violation of the law of self-preservation in the corporeal sense in which he, and Sym, understoodit. Yet unlike Sym and the many other 17th-century condemners ofsuicide, Hobbes did not feel compelled to punish this violation. Ironi-cally, Hobbes’ moderate stance toward suicide can be explainedprecisely by his unalloyed embrace of the corporeal law of self-preservation. For Hobbes had no doubt that all living things aim at theirown preservation, and because his commitment to the other-worldlyethos of Christianity was rhetorical at best, he also had no moralcompunction about claiming that individuals ought to do whatever was




required to preserve their earthly lives. Suicide, therefore, was clearlyevidence of some form of mental illness or imbalance, and he could notimagine punishing anyone whose mind was so deranged that he or shecould actually end their own life. But for Sym there was still a funda-mental ambivalence between the other-worldly ethos he shared withDonne, and the corporeal conception of self-preservation that wasascending in the 17th century. Suicide was one point on which thecorporeal law of self-preservation and the Augustinian Christian ethoswere in agreement, and Sym’s exceedingly harsh judgment of suicideallowed him to resolve that inherent tension between the two ethicalregisters he was trying to embrace.

As the corporeal understanding of self-preservation graduallyeclipsed the other-worldly ethos of Christianity, the hostility againstsuicide waned, and by the end of the 18th century the general judgmentof suicide was close to the lenient position struck by Hobbes over acentury earlier. Suicide came to be ‘regarded as a secular calamity – theconsequence of mental disease – rather than a diabolical crime’, accord-ing to MacDonald and Murphy, and consequently ‘more and more juriesreturned verdicts that labelled suicides as innocent mad people’ (1990:133). This humane Hobbesian stance toward suicide, I would like tosuggest, fits quite well with the exercise of bio-power in a system ofgovernmentality. Since Hobbesian subjects could be counted upon topursue corporeal preservation without any compunction whatsoever,suicide was best viewed as a medical problem that should be treated notby punishments inflicted by agents of the sovereign, but rather by mentalhealth professionals who aimed at maintaining a healthy, productivepopulation.

In the last decade of the 20th century, however, certain challenges tothis governmental stance toward suicide have appeared, indicating thatthe prevailing order of corporeal preservation may be on the verge of afundamental transformation. For aside from the growing numbers ofindividuals who now consider suicide as an individual right, rather thana symptom of mental illness, the mental health professions themselvesalso seem to be modifying their position on suicide. In the 1990s, studiesof American mental health professionals and counselors found that over80 per cent thought suicide could indeed be a rational choice in certaincircumstances (Werth and Liddle, 1994: 440–8; and Rogers et al., 2001:369). But the legal and medical recognition of the reasonableness ofsuicide alone poses no significant challenge to the system of governmen-tality, since the criteria for allowable suicides under Oregon’s Death withDignity Act, as well as the criteria for ‘rational suicide’ identified insurveys of mental health professionals, require that the suicide requestbe verified as reasonable by a physician and/or mental healthprofessional.18 Suicides performed under such requirements, far from




challenging the juridico-medical complex of modernity, would insteadrender suicide a safe practice, and lead ultimately to the medicalizationof suicide.19 In order to take greater advantage of the opportunity thatthis recently asserted right provides for a fundamental reconsideration ofthe subject of governmentality, whose life is ordered upon the impera-tive of corporeal preservation, it is helpful to contrast Foucault’s late-modern position on suicide with the modern one of Hobbes.

Foucault on suicide

In a 1983 interview that was published in English as ‘Social Security’,Foucault discussed the necessity of limiting the level of security that thestate could be expected to provide individuals, indirectly indicating howfar we have come since the 17th-century concern with establishing atheoretical foundation upon which the security state could be erected.During this interview he described the current experience of death, andemployed terms quite different than those famously fearsome phrasesused by Hobbes. ‘Generally speaking,’ Foucault remarked, ‘people dieunder a blanket of drugs, if not in some accident, so that they loseconsciousness entirely in a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks: theyare obliterated. We live in a world in which the medical and pharma-ceutical accompaniment of death deprives it of much of its pain anddrama’ (1988: 177). While Foucault cautioned against nostalgia for amore authentic experience of death that probably never existed, he wasnevertheless disturbed by the meaninglessness of the current experience,and ended the interview with the suggestion, ‘Let’s try rather to givemeaning and beauty to death-obliteration’ (1988: 177). What Foucaulthad in mind for such meaning and beauty was intimated earlier in theinterview, when he discussed the issue of suicide.

In response to questions about the best approach for limitingdemands on the health care system, Foucault emphasized that ‘thedecisions made ought to be the effect of a kind of ethical consensus sothat the individual may recognize himself in the decisions made and inthe values that inspired them’ (1988: 174). When the interviewer asked,‘How, in fact, can the social security system contribute to an ethics ofthe human person?’, Foucault answered:

The idea of bringing together individuals and the decision-making centersought to involve, at least as a consequence, a recognized right for every-body to kill himself when he wishes in decent conditions. . . . If I won afew billion francs in the national lottery, I’d set up an institute where peoplewho wanted to die could come and spend a weekend, a week or a month,enjoying themselves as far as possible, perhaps with the help of drugs, andthen disappear, as if by obliteration.




When the interviewer queried, ‘A right to suicide?’ Foucault simplyreplied, ‘Yes’ (1988: 176).

While it may be tempting to draw a link between the right to diemovement and Foucault’s off-hand remarks about a ‘right’ to killoneself in some sort of suicide institute, there is an important differ-ence between his position and the liberal one articulated by, forinstance, the Dream Team. As mentioned in the introduction to thisarticle, the liberal argument for the right to die is concerned withproviding to individuals enough control over their deaths so they canavoid a painful and/or degrading demise, while simultaneously main-taining the integrity of juridico-medical authority that is aimed atpreserving life. Foucault’s claims about suicide, in contrast, emergedout of an aesthetic concern with the nature of one’s life, rather thanthe circumstances of one’s death. This aesthetic sensibility was clearly,if somewhat hyperbolically, displayed in a brief 1979 essay on suicide,‘The Simplest of Pleasures’, in which Foucault criticized the commonjudgment that ‘homosexuals often commit suicide’ (1996a: 295). Hehimself tried to commit suicide more than once while a student at theÉcole Normale, and the immediate explanation offered by mentalhealth professionals, as well as biographers later on, relied on this samepsychological account of the gay proclivity toward suicide (Eribon,1991: 26–7; and Miller, 1993: 54–5). Foucault scornfully dismissed this‘ludicrous account’ in which ‘suicide and homosexuals are portrayedso as to make each other look bad’, and preferred instead to ‘see whatthere is to say in favor of suicide’ (1996a: 295).

The primary benefit he identified with suicide was not release froma ‘bad’ death, as liberals tend to argue, but rather the enhancement ofone’s entire life through the careful planning and consideration of howone would eventually end one’s life. ‘One has to prepare it, bit by bit,’he claimed, ‘decorate it, arrange the details, find the ingredients, imagineit, choose it, get advice on it, shave it into a work without spectators,one which exists only for oneself, just for that shortest little moment oflife.’ Suicide should be recognized as ‘an extremely unique experience. . . which above all the rest deserves the greatest attention – not that itshouldn’t worry you (or comfort you) – but rather so that you can makeof it a fathomless pleasure whose patient and relentless preparation willenlighten all of your life’ (1996a: 296). As possible ways of ending one’slife Foucault mentioned, perhaps facetiously, ‘[s]uicide festivals ororgies’, as well as the suicide centers he would suggest later in the ‘SocialSecurity’ interview (1988: 296–7). Whether or not he was serious aboutthese extreme suggestions, they should not detract from what I take tobe the most important aspect of Foucault’s stance toward suicide, whichis that the deliberate, anticipatory consideration of one’s chosen deathcan help individuals to live more reflective, but not necessarily moreauthentic, lives.20




Of course, many ancient schools of thought taught the benefits ofreflection upon one’s death, if not suicide, but Foucault claimed in ‘TheSimplest of Pleasures’ that ‘[t]he philosophies that promise to teach uswhat to think about death and how to die bore me to tears’ (1996a:296). He eventually overcame this boredom, however, and turned toprecisely these ancient schools of thought in his last courses and publi-cations from the early 1980s. His 1981–2 course at the Collège deFrance, for instance, ‘was devoted to the formation of the theme of thehermeneutic of the self’, and examined Platonic, Epicurean and Stoictexts. Among the various techniques employed in shaping subjects inthe ancient world, Foucault found ‘at the apex of all these exercises . . .the famous melete thanatou – a meditation on death or, rather, a trainingfor it’. In his course résumé Foucault described this technique in termsthat starkly distinguish it from the use to which Hobbes put the thoughtof death in the 17th century:

What accounts for the particular value of the death meditation is not justthe fact that it anticipates what is generally held to be the greatest misfor-tune; it is not just that it enables one to convince oneself that death is notan evil; it offers the possibility of looking back, in advance as it were, onone’s life. (1997b: 105)

There is an obviously important difference between thinking aboutone’s eventual death, on the one hand, and thinking about taking one’slife, on the other, and many ancient schools of thought, such as Platon-ism, encouraged the former while condemning the latter. Stoicism,however, explicitly linked the melete thanatou and suicide, and Foucaultwas keenly interested in this school in the last years of his life. Seneca, inparticular, appeared in his 1981–2 course, and also figured prominentlyin his last publication, The Care of the Self, where this Roman Stoic wasfrequently cited to provide examples of the ancient imperative to perpet-ually cultivate oneself (1986: 39–68). Unfortunately for our purposes, thediscussion of Seneca in The Care of the Self was focused largely on sexualpleasures, passions and desires, and not on the melete thanatou or suicide.However, Foucault did discuss Seneca’s stance toward death in an import-ant interview conducted just five months before he died, titled ‘The Ethicsof the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’.

Although this late interview was concerned primarily with thesecond and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, at one point aninterviewer asked about the relation between Foucault’s recent interestin the care of the self and a theme that concerned him throughout hiscareer: ‘But doesn’t the human condition, in terms of its finitude, playa very important role here? . . . It seems to me that this problem offinitude is very important; the fear of death, of finitude, of being hurt,is at the heart of the care for self’ (1997a: 289; for an alternative trans-lation, see Foucault, 1987: 9).21 Foucault responded to this crucial




question by contrasting the Greco-Roman stance toward death, particu-larly that of the Stoics, with that of Christianity:

Christianity, by presenting salvation as occurring beyond life, in a wayupsets or at least disturbs the balance of the care of the self. . . . Amongthe Greeks and Romans, however, given that one takes care of oneself inone’s own life, and that the reputation one leaves behind is the only after-life one can expect, the care of the self can be centered entirely on oneself,on what one does, on the place one occupies among others. It can becentered totally on the acceptance of death – this will become quite evidentin late Stoicism – and can even, up to a point, become almost a desire fordeath. . . . In Seneca, for example, it is interesting to note the importanceof the theme, let us hurry and get old, let us hasten toward the end, so thatwe may thereby come back to ourselves. This type of moment before death,when nothing more can happen, is different from the desire for death onefinds among Christians, who expect salvation through death. It is like themovement to rush through life to the point where there is no longeranything ahead but the possibility of death. (1997a: 289; cf. 1987: 9)

Although there certainly is room to challenge Foucault’s claims aboutthe Stoic stance toward death and the afterlife, not to mention the valuethat the Stoics placed upon worldly reputation, this is not the place toengage in these quarrels. What is crucial for our purposes is thatFoucault clearly appreciated Stoicism’s undeniable acceptance of deathas an unavoidable and natural part of life, and not as a punishment thatneeds to be avenged by a savior, as in Christianity, or as an evil thatneeds to be postponed as long as possible, as in Hobbesian modernity.

While Seneca’s longing for death was particularly intriguing toFoucault, it is important to note that Seneca also emphatically endorsedsuicide as a crucial facet of the care of the self. Although Foucault didnot discuss Seneca’s stance toward suicide in any of the interviews,courses, or publications from the 1980s, his claims about suicide in ‘TheSimplest of Pleasures’ were remarkably similar to the advice Senecaoffered in letters to his friend Lucilius. For instance, while Foucaultclaimed that one’s suicide is a project that ‘exists only for oneself’,Seneca wrote:

Nowhere should we indulge the soul more than in dying. Let it go as itlists: if it craves the sword or the noose or some potion that constricts theveins, on with it, let it break the chain of its slavery. A man’s life shouldsatisfy other people as well, his death only himself, and whatever sort helikes is best. (Seneca, 1958: 204; also see Motto, 1973: 76; and Alvarez,1990: 80)

Both also seemed to agree that one ought to think about, and be readyto perform (rather than commit), one’s suicide, and Foucault wouldlikely concur with Seneca’s judgment that ‘[i]t is a great man who not




only orders his own death but contrives it’ (1958: 207). Despite thisshared appreciation of the benefits of planning how one would end one’slife under certain circumstances, there is nevertheless a particulartension between Seneca and Foucault in regard to one aspect of suicide– its emancipatory potential.

Seneca frequently employed the language of liberation in discussingsuicide, as when he described suicide as ‘break[ing] through thetrammels of human bondage’, or wrote that ‘a scalpel opens the wayout to the great emancipation’ (1958: 205). At other points he used thelanguage of freedom, but still in the sense of liberation. For instance, inhis criticism of those ‘professed philosophers who assert that . . . wemust wait . . . for the end Nature has decreed’, Seneca argued that ‘[t]heman who says this does not see that he has blocked his road to freedom’(1958: 204). Foucault, however, had ‘always been somewhat suspiciousof the notion of liberation’ because it implied there was some essentialself that could be emancipated (1997a: 282; cf. 1987: 2). He preferredinstead to ‘emphasize practices of freedom over processes of liberation’,and in clarifying his conception of freedom he explicitly endorsed theGreco-Roman model in which ‘the care of the self was the mode inwhich individual freedom . . . was reflected as an ethics’ (1997a: 283–4;cf. 1987: 3–4). He emphasized that ‘extensive work by the self on theself is required for this practice of freedom to take shape in an ethosthat is good, beautiful, honorable, estimable, memorable, and exem-plary’ (1997a: 286; cf. 1987: 6). Certainly, the Stoics embraced thisconception of working on oneself, and Seneca thought that the tech-nique of reflecting on how and when one would perform suicide wascrucial to the formation of an exemplary life. In fact, he advised Luciliusthat ‘it is most essential to keep our end in mind. Other exercises’, suchas the anticipation of losing one’s wealth, health, or loved ones, ‘mayprove futile’, because one might never face circumstances that wouldtest these characteristics. But he emphasized that reflecting aboutwhether or not one should continue living was training that ‘must oneday be put to use’ (1958: 205).

So to the extent that Seneca thought the act of suicide was an eman-cipation of the individual from a burdensome or vexing life, Foucaultwould part company with the sage and treat such a death as a termin-ation rather than a liberation, but to the extent that Seneca thought thatreflection on suicide was itself a source of freedom, Foucault wouldcertainly concur. For both believed that the practice of thinking aboutthe trajectory and shape one’s life has taken, in order to determinewhether one should continue to live, provided a valuable opportunityto periodically judge the quality of one’s life. What Foucault said of themelete thanatou holds true for the meditation on suicide as well – ‘it isa way of making death actual in life. . . . It tends to make one live each




day as if it were the last’ (1997b: 104). And for Seneca, such medita-tion was crucial in instilling in individuals the central lesson of Stoicism:

Living is not the good, but living well. The wise man . . . lives as long ashe should, not as long as he can. He will observe where he is to live, withwhom, how, and what he is to do. He will always think of life in terms ofquality, not quantity. (1958: 202)

Without doubt, many contemporary arguments for the right to diealso emphasize ‘quality of life’, but such quality is determined by theconditions of a person’s impending death, and is fundamentally differentthan the determination of quality that Seneca and Foucault had in mind.According to these current arguments, death is an appropriate choicewhen illness or age has brought a person close to death and robbed himor her of the ability to take care of his or her own bodily functions, experi-ence worldly pleasures or interact meaningfully with others. The quality-of-life considerations Seneca and Foucault thought relevant for the suicidedecision, on the other hand, were not determined by the conditions of aperson’s imminent death, but were rather focused upon the moral andaesthetic quality of the life the person had actually lived. If it would bedifficult to continue living a good and beautiful life, whether or not deathis imminent, then suicide may be the appropriate choice. This emphasison the moral and aesthetic quality of one’s life, instead of the circum-stances of one’s death, is reflected in Cicero’s shocking claim that Stoicsfrequently judged it best to end their lives at a moment of ‘supreme happi-ness’. A provocative example of just such a suicide was provided by theessayist Montaigne, who preceded Donne in challenging the punitiveattitude toward suicide that emerged at the outset of modernity. In hisessay ‘The Custom of the Isle of Cea’ (1573–4), Montaigne approvinglyrecounted Sextus Pompeius’ account of the suicide of an elderly, respectedwoman of authority from this island. Although Sextus Pompeius tried toconvince her to abandon her publicly announced intention of taking herown life, she justified her decision by saying: ‘For my part, having alwaysexperienced the favorable face of Fortune, lest the desire to live too longmay make me see one of her contrary faces, I am going to dismiss theremains of my soul by a happy end, leaving two daughters of my ownand a legion of grandchildren’ (Montaigne, 1958: 251).22

Conclusion

Over the course of his career Foucault revealed that modernity isgrounded in a dual inversion in the status of death, both in the realm ofmedicine and in the exercise of power. On Foucault’s account the illumi-nation of death by pathological anatomy provided an epistemological




foundation not only for medicine, but for the human sciences in general,and the knowledge generated by these disciplines helped facilitate thetransition from the sovereign’s power of life and death to the positive,productive form of power that administers and optimizes life inmodernity. I have tried to show, over Foucault’s objections, that Hobbes’political theory reflects a third inversion of the status of death that isintegrally related to those inversions identified by Foucault. Rather thanlonging for death, as urged in the Platonic/Christian tradition, theHobbesian subject feared death and sought to preserve life above allelse, and such subjects were therefore precisely the sort who wereamenable to governmental techniques and strategies that aimed atpromoting the health and longevity of the population. Recently, thesuccess of the modern project of death deferral has generated a varietyof divisive bio-ethical dilemmas, but the return of the public discussionof suicide at the turn of the 21st century provides a more fertile oppor-tunity than any other bio-ethical issue for a fundamental challenge tothe juridico-medical complex of modernity. When considered in thecontext of the early-modern suicide debate, the current assertion of theright to die throws into relief, and opens to contestation, the comple-mentary roles that the imperative of corporeal preservation and medicalauthority have played in governing Hobbesian subjects.

Liberal arguments for the right to die, such as that offered by theDream Team, do indeed challenge the modern, Hobbesian stancetoward death (as something to be deferred as long as possible) andsuicide (as the result of mental illness), but these arguments still rely, asdid Hobbes’ political theory, on the fear of death. The death feared byliberal proponents of the right to die, however, is not the violent, prema-ture death that terrified Hobbes in the 17th century, but rather aprolonged, gradual death that is the promise/threat offered by modernmedical culture.23 While the Dream Team claims that ‘[m]ost of us seedeath – whatever we think will follow it – as the final act of life’s drama,and we want that last act to reflect our own convictions, those we havetried to live by’, their emphasis is on preventing ‘the convictions ofothers [being] forced on us in our most vulnerable moment’ (Dworkinet al., 1997: 44). For these liberals, ‘[d]eath is . . . among the mostsignificant events of life’ (1997: 44), but if one cannot control that eventthe quality of one’s life is significantly diminished. In order to managethis fear of a death that is controlled and imposed by medical author-ity, the right to die movement ironically seeks to establish the right tomedical assistance in suicide and/or euthanasia. This goal of gainingcontrol over death will likely be unfulfilled as the legalization, rational-ization and medicalization of suicide will render it a safe practice withinthe administrative parameters of the juridico-medical order, but that isnot my primary objection to liberal claims about the right to die. Rather,




my concern is that by focusing on controlling one’s death this liberalperspective does not foster critical reflection upon those convictions bywhich one lives one’s life, and leaves unchallenged the role of medicalauthority in shaping those convictions.

As a supplement, if not an alternative, to the standard liberal argu-ments for the right to die, Foucault’s Stoic-inspired stance towardsuicide can help reveal certain hopeful possibilities that are overlookedin the current discussion of this right. For as Seneca, Montaigne, Donneand Foucault all understood, the self that ought to be preserved is notsimply the body, but the character of the life of that embodied self.Although I am certainly not offering her as an example that ought tonecessarily be followed, reflection upon the suicide of the woman fromCea might help us late-moderns recognize the extent to which we aregoverned by the imperative of corporeal preservation that underlies themedicalized culture of modernity. The calm, thoughtful suicide of thiswoman who chose to end her life at a point when things were goingquite well, and her faculties remained intact, may seem scandalous tothose of us who, like Hobbes, live in order to avoid death. But toimagine living one’s life with such an intense concern about one’s char-acter, and the way one’s life was going, would generate greater possi-bilities for the ‘practices of freedom’, in the Foucauldian sense, than willbald assertions of the liberal right to end one’s life with a physician’shelp when death is already at hand. At best, this liberal stance can onlyoffer the quite likely hollow promise of providing control over one’sdeath, while the Foucauldian/ Stoic stance offers the possibility of livinga more deliberate, reflective life that will nevertheless always remainbeyond one’s control.

The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, USA

Notes

1 This article is derived from fragments of several chapters of a larger projectthat is tentatively titled ‘The Government(ality) of Health: Death, Medicine,and the Health-Conscious Subject’.

2 One of the leading proponents of PAS and euthanasia in Australia is Dr.Philip Nitschke, who is often portrayed as Australia’s equivalent ofAmerica’s ‘Dr. Death’, Jack Kevorkian; see Beam, 2003; McInerney, 2000:148; Mydans, 1997: 3; Singer, 1994: 138–9; and ERGO!: 2005.

3 ‘Dutch Upper House Backs Aided-Suicide’, The New York Times, 11 April2001: sec. A, p. 3. For critical discussions of the Dutch practice of euthan-asia and PAS, see: Smith, 2000: 109–11; Hendin, 1997: 49, 75–8; andWelie, 1992: 423–7. For a more complete and less damning examination


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of the Dutch experience with medically assisted death, see Pijnenborg et al.,1993: 1196–9; Singer, 1994: 151–6; Battin, 2003: 402–5; and Battin, 1994:130–44.

4 Washington et al. v. Glucksberg et al. (521 U.S. 702) and Vacco v. Quillet al. (521 U.S. 793).

5 For a thorough discussion of Foucault’s reconsideration of his conceptionof power during the second half of the 1970s, see Gordon, 2000; for ashorter discussion see Rabinow, 1997: xv–xvii.

6 The status of The Birth of the Clinic does seem to be changing in certainfields, however. In particular, British historians and sociologists of medicinehave begun to reconsider their initial hostility to this text; e.g. see Jonesand Porter, 1994: 10–11; Rose, 1994; and Armstrong, 2002: 178–9.

7 I link Foucault’s early claims from The Birth of the Clinic concerning thesignificance of pathological anatomy, with his later concept of governmen-tality, in Tierney, 1998.

8 Concerning the light by which Bichat illuminated the ‘abyss of illness’,Foucault wrote that it is ‘the same light, no doubt, that illuminates the 120Journees of Sodome, Juliette, and the Desastres de Soya’ (1973a: 195). Inthe realm of painting Foucault listed Goya, Delacroix and Gericault, butdid not mention David, although I believe that he too belongs in this group.In literature, he mentioned Baudelaire, Holderlin and, of course, Nietzsche.

9 Foucault’s most protracted engagement with Hobbes was in his lecturefrom 4 February 1976; see Foucault, 2003: 89–111.

10 Foucault examined the role that equality played in Hobbes’ account of thenatural state of war, in Foucault, 2003: 90–1.

11 For Hobbes’ description of vanity and the violence engendered by thispassion, see 1962: 99. Leo Strauss demonstrated at length how the compe-tition that occured in Hobbes’ state of nature expanded into a life-and-death struggle in the presence of this uncontrolled appetite, or passion, ofvanity; see Strauss, 1952: 6–29.

12 There are other passions besides the fear of death that lead people out ofthe state of nature, and these may be grouped together as the desire forconvenience, or ‘commodious living’, to use Hobbes’ term. I have writtenabout these passions elsewhere; see Tierney, 1993: 174–5, 179–80.

13 I think Strauss was justified in emphasizing the centrality of death inHobbes’ understanding of the transition from the state of nature to civilsociety; for Hobbes claimed that since mortal conflict is always a threat-ening possibility in the state of nature, the ‘continual fear, and danger ofviolent death’ is the ‘worst of all’ the incommodities of the natural state ofwar (1962: 100).

14 In the 16th century Calvin recognized the emergence of Christian subjectsof the sort Hobbes envisioned, but found it strange that ‘many who boastof being Christians, instead of thus longing for death, are so afraid of itthat they tremble at the very mention of it as a thing ominous and dreadful’(1845: II, 290).

15 Several scholars have identified earlier appearances of suicide; seeMacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 145–6, including note 3 on p. 145;Alvarez, 1990: 68; and Noon, 1978: 372.




16 I discuss the shifting relationship between self-preservation and self-ownership in Tierney, 1999.

17 That Hobbes was not personally opposed to suicide is also indicated in a letter he wrote to the physician Guy Patin, indicating that he wouldrather die than repeat the experience of passing kidney stones; see Stoffell,1991: 28.

18 See Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act (1995), Oregon Revised Statutes,127.800–127.995; for criteria for rational suicide, see Werth and Cobia,1995: 231–40.

19 I make such an argument in Tierney, 1997: 71–2. Also see Salem, 1999:30–6; and Prado, 2003: 207–10.

20 Although this emphasis on the thought of death as a spur to a more delib-erate, reflective life is related to Heidegger’s claims about the existentialexperience of death and authentic existence in Being and Time, there is animportant difference that separates Foucault’s and Heidegger’s positions.For Heidegger, it was the impossibility of experiencing one’s own death,and the thought of death as the impossibility of any being-in-the-worldwhatsoever, which evoked a mood of anxiety that goaded individuals tolive a more deliberate, authentic form of existence (see Heidegger, 1962:secs 50–3: 293–311). On the other hand, Foucault, at least in ‘The Simplestof Pleasures’, claimed that one ought to envision and imagine one’s deathin its specificity.

21 The issue of finitude was a dominant theme in Foucault’s early publications.Aside from its centrality in The Birth of the Clinic, finitude also figuredprominently in The Order of Things (1966[1973b]), where Foucaultcharacterized the modern project of turning the fundamental limitations ofhuman existence – life, language and labor – into the specialized fields ofbiology, linguistics and economics, as an ‘analytic of finitude’ (1973b:312–18).

22 In his frequently misinterpreted, or rather, malignly interpreted, essay ‘IsThere a Duty to Die?’, John Hardwig expressed a stance toward suicidethat is somewhat similar to that of the woman from Cea; see Hardwig,1997.

23 Opponents of the right to die rely on the fear of a premature death that issimilar to the fear that animated Hobbes’ political theory, except that thepremature death these opponents fear is not a violent death at the handsof another in a state of nature, but rather a peaceful, painless death imposedtoo early on the aged and infirm by medical authority within advancedcultures. Elsewhere I have contrasted this quasi-Hobbesian fear that informsmuch of the opposition to the right to die, with the quasi-Heideggerian‘anxiety’ about being kept alive in a state of obliviousness that motivatesmany supporters of the right to die; see Tierney, 1997: 73.


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Suicidal Thoughts [Hobbes, Foucault, And the Right to Die]

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