Mosaic Journal

Issue 56.4

Overview

Special Issue: Suicides II

Published: December 2023

View the issue introduction or see the issue summary and contents below.

9 essays, totalling 176 pages

$29.95 CAD

Issue Summary

Issue 56.4 collects essays from the Mosaic archive on the topic of suicide.

Contents

	Lifedeath and Suicide David Farrell Krell When someone we know ends his or her life we are banished to the silence of the outside; uncomprehending is too weak a word for this extrusion. Among the matters of lifedeath, suicide is perhaps one of the most compelling, if not one of the most avidly discussed. I will touch on the debate surrounding “assisted suicide,” although this is not my theme. My theme is the radical exteriority and the silence to which we others are abandoned in virtually every instance of suicide. The outside and the silence have something to do with writing. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 48.2.
	‘cease to exist in order to be’: Worstward Ho between Badiou and Deleuze Christopher Langlois In Handbook of Inaesthetics, Alain Badiou develops a disagreement with Gilles Deleuze over the ontology of artistic creation. By contextualizing this disagreement in Beckett’s Worstward Ho, however, we see that it is Deleuze who brings us closer to a position where the difficulties peculiar to artistic thought are better theorized. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 45.3.
	Tell My Story: Freud, Hamlet, and the Burden of Self-Authorship Andrew Barnaby Aiming to put Freud’s writings in dialogue with Shakespeare’s Hamlet, this essay considers the burden of speaking for oneself as the burden of what it means to call oneself into being against the precedence—the authority and priority—of another. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 52.4.
	From Suspect to Species: Climate Crime in Antti Tuomainen The Healer Sarah Dimick Although the idea of climate crime is prevalent within environmental discourse, crime narratives are difficult to map onto a crisis of common yet differentiated human agency. Examining The Healer, Antti Tuomainen’s cli-fi murder mystery, this essay suggests that justice must be pursued without the imperative of moral righteousness. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 51.3.
	Tragic Foundationalism Jeffrey R. Wilson This essay puts the modern philosopher Alain Badiou’s theory of foundationalism into dialogue with the early modern playwright William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Doing so reveals a new candidate for Hamlet’s traditionally hard-to-define hamartia—his “tragic mistake”—while providing an opportunity to theorize the notion of tragic foundationalism. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 52.4.
	The Theme of Suicide in the French-Canadian Novel since 1945 M.G. Hesse This essay was originally published in Mosaic 5.4.
	The Ethics of Melancholic Witness: Janet Frame and W.G. Sebald Josephine Carter This essay examines how two twentieth-century writers, Janet Frame and W.G. Sebald, represent the ethical responsibilities of the witness in relation to melancholia. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 46.1.
	Courir á toute vietesse. Note télégraphique sur un poème de pensée de J.D. Ginette Michaud Ce texte propose une lecture d’un fragment inédit du Séminaire de Jacques Derrida (actuellement en cours d’édition) dans lequel il commente deux vers du poète John Donne. Les questions de la survie, de la vie et de la vitesse, de la jouissance au présent du passé, de la mélancolie se trouvent puissamment condensées et relancées par Derrida dans cet hétéroautoportrait émouvant dessinant d’un trait vif toute sa pensée. Cet essai a été initialement publié dans Mosaic 40.2
	Mourning as the Origin of Humanity François Dastur In this essay, I suggest that the most original manner of defining humans might be simply to say that they are strange animals who bury their dead, since that which characterizes humanity as such is the refusal to submit to the natural order, this cycle of life and death that rules over all living beings. This explains the importance in all cultures of the practice of funeral rites. The death with which we are confronted is the death of others, and in particular of those who are close to us. Mourning can therefore be defined as the human capacity of having a relation to those who are no longer present in the world. Seen in this light, mourning can be considered as the fundamental mode of being human. This essay was originally published in Mosaic 48.3.