The media and suicide: a brief genealogy of the narrative of death

Abstract

The aim of this work is to approach, from a genealogical perspective, the issue of suicide and its relations with media devices. The case of a young brazilian man that recounted his own suicide on Internet is the starting point for us to investigate how cyberspace interferes with self-creation. To rethink this problem, we investigate two other cases: the publication, in nineteenth century, of Goethe’s “The sorrows of young Werther” – and the suicide profusion that came with it – and the death of rocker Kurt Cobain, in a century profoundly mediated by mass culture. We suggest suicide is fundamentally a biopolitics issue, in a context in which media has an important rule in contemporary times of salvation medicine.