An Essay On Suicide - Loïck Roche

The Laugh of the Mona Lisa
LOÏCK ROCHE
THE LAUGH OF THE MONA LISA

An Essay on Suicide
Contact:
Loïck Roche
loick.roche@grenoble-em.com
Loïck Roche, AMP (Harvard), is a graduate of ESSEC Business School, Paris;

Doctor of Psychology, Doctor of Philosophy and accredited for the supervision of
research in management sciences (HDR). Author or co-author of about thirty books,
specialist in innovation, in well-being in the workplace and in company
performance, he is today Associate Director and Vice-Dean of Grenoble Ecole de
Management (France).
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To Dieter
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“I will undertake the difficult task

of making you understand,
let’s say…, something…”
(Lacan)
“Death is a part of faith [prolonged silence]; you are

perfectly right to believe that you will die, of course.
[Prolonged silence] That sustains you! [Prolonged silence] If
you did not believe this [prolonged silence]; would you be
able to accept the life that you have?”
Louvain, 1972, Catholic University. As we are speaking

of death… The person who is speaking there, who is
shouting, in a room that is too small, obliging his audience
to even sit on the floor – but he likes that – it’s Lacan. A
Lacan who, in the twilight of his life (he died in 1981), is far
from the one whom we know hit his patients with a cane.
Patients who he believed did not want to engage what Lacan
-3-
called their “understandability”, as Jean-Baptiste Pontalis

said. This same day at Louvain, when he was jostled by a
student – a student who spilled the water jug over his notes
and threw them out, sweeping everything off the desk –
Lacan analysed this gesture in a nutshell – it was… an act of
love!
And here too, much is also inherent in suicide…
As Harold Searles wrote (The Effort to Drive the Other

Person Crazy) “I am more and more convinced that, in the
quantity of situational factors which influence the human
being’s emotional capacities, there is nothing stronger than
this simple fact: for each individual, this complex thing
called life, this thing which fascinates us, tortures us, excites
us, bores us, reassures us and frightens us, which has its
moments of simple peace and its moments of complex
torment, all this will inevitably end one day.”
-4-
“If we did not rely strongly on this certitude, that this

will finish” continued Lacan, still with his prolonged silences,
“would you be able to accept this story? [Prolonged silence]
Nevertheless, it’s only an act of faith. [Prolonged silence]
And to cap it all, you are not sure of it. [Prolonged silence]
Why shouldn’t there be a man or a woman who could live for
150 years, well, why not? [Prolonged silence] This is where
faith finds its strength. [Prolonged silence] You know, me,
what I am telling you here, it’s because I’ve seen it.
[Prolonged silence] One of my patients, so long ago that it is
no longer spoken about, otherwise I would not tell her story,
she dreamed one day that existence would always rebound
of its own accord. [Prolonged silence] The Pascalian dream.
An infinity of lives succeeding each other with no possible
end. [Prolonged silence] She woke up almost mad.
[Prolonged silence] She told me this. I can assure you that I
did not find it funny.”
§
“The anxiety of the finality of life is too hard to bear if
one is not strengthened by the idea that one is a total
person and that, thanks to this totality, one is able to
participate totally in life – capable of proving oneself by
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being a part of this entire community called humanity, each

of whose members is faced with a single outcome. An
individual cannot bear the idea of inevitable death until he
has lived life to the full”. (Harold Searles, The Effort to Drive
the Other Person Crazy)
“As an arrow to its target, and we never miss it, […] we

know, wrote Albert Caraco in his Handbook of Chaos, that
we will die, sometime, somewhere, somehow”.
If we exercise our “understandability”, what we mean by

this is: that death, as Michel Serres said, “is our great
teacher”. As for life (and this is the most important), it is
only bearable because we know… Because we know that it
will really, maybe tragically, end one day. This is where
suicide finds its place!
As suicide was no stranger to Lacan, rumours were
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circulating: “It appears that there are many suicides at

Lacan’s.” “By accepting to listen to those who were going to
die, wrote Pierre Rey (A season at Lacan’s), [Lacan] was one
of the rare people to accept the risk of their inevitable break.
Almost no other analyst, to avoid staining his visiting card
with death, would be brave enough to meet, even only once,
a single one of those looks, to accept the challenge from one
of these “people for death”. “This type of suffering,
continued Rey, was never turned away by him. In cases of
extreme anguish, he held the life of others in his hands. […]
If he had let go, if he had made the slightest mistake in his
assessment, pronounced an unfortunate word, prolonged a
silence, forced a look at the wrong moment, the whole
situation could fall into oblivion: among these condemned
souls grasping for death, destined for death, almost dead
and whom he tore from death’s grasp to bring them back to
the river’s bank – how many, without his help, would have
survived?”
Patients committed themselves. “And afterwards?” Lacan

could have asked when he did not say anything even worse
– we will return to this. One cannot always go against what
is inevitable. Against those – including schizophrenics – who
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say that they are going to commit suicide. Assertions that

were constantly repeated, attempts that were multiplied.
Like Hansi, a young schizophrenic, they can go to a
crossroads for a taxi which will take them to the hospital’s
day service, walk down the middle of the road, be rebuffed
by motorist’s horns, lie on the tramlines. Although they are
saved on that occasion by passers-by, by the taxi driver who
well knew that in accepting this type of journey he would be
having problems, they nevertheless inevitably finish by
“succeeding”. Like Hansi who, one morning, threw himself
out of the window...
“Life, wrote Cioran, is bearable only with the idea that

one may leave it when one wishes. It is our choice […] to be
able to leave the stage when we want to; this is an
exhilarating idea.” If our thoughts are ambivalent – how can
they be otherwise? – we know that, in life, we hold the
upper hand. This was not always the case. In the Roman
Empire, those close to the Emperor who wanted to commit
suicide had first to seek his permission. As is shown, for
example, by Marguerite Yourcenar in Memoirs of Hadrian.
-8-
“Suicide, wrote Kant, is a free act.” “The ultimate

freedom for mankind” for the Austrian philosopher Jean
Améry (whose real name was Hans Mayer and who was a
prisoner with Primo Lévy at Auschwitz), in a book on suicide
published in 1976. This liberty, this is what saves us! It “only
depends on me. I own it, wrote Pierre Rey; to leave life if
the desire for life leaves me.”
We can, when we wish to do so, depart from life by

committing suicide. “Without the idea of suicide, one would
kill oneself on the spot!” wrote Cioran who, suffering from
Alzheimer’s disease, died in 1995. Perhaps because of the
illness, Cioran “forgot” to commit suicide. Unless he
deliberately refused to do so. “One always kills oneself too
late!” he said. Cioran preferred to write. Rather like “Do
what I write, not what I do…” Books which, for him, were “a
postponed suicide” But writing is in fact a real therapy, an
antidote to suicide… And perhaps also a solace for a lack of
courage!
-9-
Jean-Noël Cuénod, the Paris correspondent for the

Tribune de Genève and 24-Hours, wrote that to “live one’s
life” one needs to have an understanding for death.
Even though suicide is not condemned by the Church,

(we will return to this), one can make a link with religion.
For Jean-Noël Cuénod, this is the annual message – we are
redeemed at Easter.
In the time of Plato, who was a believer, death was the

property of gods and the Fates, the commanding divinities of
human destiny who cut the cordon of life. Committing
suicide was therefore (already) in opposition to the gods’
wishes.
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There are always those who constantly want to prevent

perpetual suicides!
Another restriction on the freedom to commit suicide is

the belief in mental illness, i.e. the idea that it can be
morally correct to oppose someone’s right to consider
suicide (one must not be afraid of ridicule…) or to commit
suicide (which already appears more rational). For Lawrence
Stevens – a lawyer who, whilst exercising his profession also
defended the psychologically “ill”, and whose works on the
Internet are deliberately free of copyright to encourage their
distribution – a diagnosis of “mental illness” is without doubt
a value judgement on the thoughts or behaviour of this or
that person, and not a diagnosis based on “good faith”. “The
so-called mental illness, wrote Stevens, does not deny a
person his free judgement; on the contrary, it is his
expression of it (even if it is met with the disapproval of
others). […] Furthermore, there is no serious proof
confirming that mental illness – whatever its definition – is
at the origin of a decision to commit suicide. For Marion
Crook (Stop Suicide Association, Montreal: Suicide, thirty
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teenagers speak of their attempts): “Adolescents

contemplating the possibility of suicide are not necessarily
mentally unhinged. In fact, they rarely are”. The
psychologist Paul Quinnett (Suicide: The Forever Decision),
reaches the same conclusion: “It is not necessary to suffer
from a mental illness in order to attempt to take one’s life.
In fact, most people who commit suicide are not legally
“mad”. […] One does not therefore have to suffer from
mental illness to think about suicide.” What Paul Quinnett
states, writes Stevens, is a clear recognition of the fact that
alleging mental illness in order to interne suicidal people is
dishonest. “To knowingly swear a false accusation of “mental
illness” before a Court […] is a form of authoritarianism and
despotism. […] This is indeed imprisonment for the crime of
holding an opinion as described by George Orwell in his
novel 1984.”
“Certain people, explains Lawrence Stevens, believe

that it is fair to use force to prevent someone committing
suicide; they are convinced that the impulse for potential
death in a person is probably only temporary, and it will
either partially or totally go away if the person is forced to
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live a little longer, until the strong emotional reaction to a

recent traumatic event disappears over time.
[…] The usual justification given for forced internment,

and the so-called treatment of those who think of suicide or
who make the effort to kill themselves, is that this could lead
to a potentially dangerous situation. But even those who
disagree with the principle of “self-ownership” (which we will
mention later) need to ask the question: danger – but for
whom?
[…] Another factor to be considered is that mental

health specialists, contrary to what they may state,
involuntarily encourage suicide rather than preventing it. […]
Because of the harmful effects of modern bio-psychiatric
treatment, the boredom and cruelty that sometimes reign in
treatment centres as well as the lack of self-esteem and
discrimination which then have their effects in the
educational system and professional workplace, a higher
percentage of suicides is to be expected among those who
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have undergone psychiatric treatment compared to the

number of suicides which had not been treated.
[Paradoxically] recognising the right to commit suicide is not
only to respect personal freedom; it is also to avoid the
harm and cruelty generated in the name of preventing
suicides.”
During his existence, and if he enjoys at least a part of

his mental and physical capacities, the human being has
only two certitudes: the certitude of his death and the
certitude that he can choose the moment and, in part, the
place and manner of this death. As Lawrence Stevens
remarks in an audio cassette version of their book Life 101
published in 1990, John-Roger and Peter McWilliams explain
– as we have already mentioned – that “the consensus of
descriptions made by a wide range of people demonstrates
the possibility that death may not be so bad. […] Suicide
always remains an option. This is what sometimes makes life
bearable. [Always the best… “safeguard”]. The fact that we
do not absolutely have to live down here can make life
easier.” “A single remedy to avoid thinking of death: write a
book about death” as Vladimir Jankelevitch so truly wrote.
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Here too, without being schizophrenic! “When working

with schizophrenics, wrote Harold Searles (The Effort to
Drive the Other Person Crazy), one quickly sees that many
of them are […] incapable of “feeling alive” all the time. This
repression has a defensive role: one does not have to fear
death if one feels dead: subjectively, one has nothing to lose
by dying.
Although the first certitude – the certitude of one’s death

– is undeniable, everyone has experienced at least once this
second certitude – we can decide the moment of our death.
“I was on the rails, and travelling. [Then] the locomotive

became unreliable, stopping without reason. It was at that
moment that the idea of death sprung into my daily life”.
(Camus, The Fall)
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“Everyone, at least once, either seriously or “courteously

and superficially” as Camus wrote (The Fall), has
experienced the thought of committing suicide.
In the backpack of our torment, we all have suicidal

thoughts!
We are like the characters of Dostoyevsky, of Kurosawa.

“Why, explains Deleuze, is Kurosawa on familiar terms with
the characters from Dostoyevsky and Shakespeare? Why is
it a Japanese who is so familiar with Dostoyevsky and
Shakespeare? Something quite curious often happens with
Dostoyevsky’s characters. They are usually very excited. A
person goes out, goes into the street and says to someone:
“Tania, the woman I love, is calling me for help. I’m going,
I’m running. Yes, Tania will die if I don’t go.” Then he meets
a friend or he sees a dead dog. And he completely forgets
that Tania, dying, is waiting for him. He again starts
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speaking like that. Then he meets another friend, he has tea

at this friend’s house and all of a sudden he says: “Tania is
waiting for me, I must go.” What does this mean? With
Dostoyevsky, the characters are always in a hurry. And,
while they concerned with pressing affairs to do with life and
death, they know that there is a still more urgent matter and
they don’t know what it is – and that is what stops them.
Everything happens as if in the greatest urgency, the house
is on fire, I must go, I say to myself: “No, no, there is
something more important and I won’t move until I know
what it is. It’s The Idiot. It’s the formula for The Idiot. There
is a more urgent problem. Everything can burn down but
there is a more urgent problem. […] Kurosawa’s characters
have exactly that problem. They are absorbed in impossible
situations but, beware, there is a more important problem
and I must know what it is. The 7 samurai […] are in an
critical situation. They accept defending the village and from
one end to the other they are thinking of something more
serious. And this will be expressed by the chief samurai as
they leave: “What is a samurai?” What is a samurai, not in
general but what is a samurai at that moment in time? He’s
somebody who is no longer a nobody. The masters no longer
need them and the peasants will soon know how to defend
themselves on their own.
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“We other samurai, what are we?” It is this question

that we never stop asking ourselves!
“The idea of suicide, wrote Nietzsche (Beyond good and

evil) is a powerful consolation [which] helps us to get
through many bad nights”.
Suicide can affect everybody. Indeed, suicide impinges

upon everybody. Like during the Great War in which
everyone had a family member who was killed or injured -
everyone, among their relations, knew someone who had
committed suicide. Unless they tried but failed like Yvette in
Maupassant, “trapped” by chloroform which offers sweet
dreams…
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“How many people wanted to commit suicide and were

content by just tearing up their photograph?” wrote Jules
Renard in his Journal.
Already in Roman antiquity, as can be found on the

Wikipedia Free Encyclopaedia website, Seneca was a witness
to the universality of suicide, touching all classes of Roman
society: “Men of all classes, of any income, of all ages ended
their distress by committing suicide.” This is referred to by
Montaigne in a chapter of Essays entitled “Customs of the Ile
of Cea” where he gives numerous examples of voluntary
death in Antique times.
Things are no better today. As Durkheim has already

shown (Suicide, published in 1897), suicide is increasing in
proportion to societal and economic disorders. Whether it is
crises or… the improvement in the economy, the individual
loses himself. He can no longer regain his place.
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”Thinking about suicide is an everyday thing” wrote

Lawrence Stevens. He continues that for Earl Grollman, in
his book Suicide published in 1988, “almost everybody, at
one time or another, has thought of committing suicide.” In
Suicide: The Forever Decision, the psychologist Paul
Quinnett shows that “a large majority of people have
envisaged suicide at one time or another during their
existence, and have done so very seriously.”
Listing like Prévert, perhaps excluding the racoon… the

imagination for committing suicide knows no bounds…
§
Each of us has Socrates’ hemlock within reach; the phial
of cyanide that we will break unless, like Katow, the
pragmatic hero in The Human Condition, we offer it to two
unknown prisoners, literally dying of fear – Katow who knew
that he was condemned to be burnt alive in the fire of a
locomotive because of his political ideas… Each of us has
available Bettelheim’s plastic bag with which, on March 13,
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1990 he covered his head; the window through which Gilles

Deleuze jumped on November 4, 1995; the lift-cage from
the top of which Primo Lévy threw himself on April 11, 1987,
the first day of the Jewish Easter; the sword that is used for
seppuku, the ceremonial Japanese suicide; the Hara Kiri of
the samurai who, out of respect for the Bushido (the code of
moral principles that the Japanese samurai were required to
respect), killed himself to avoid being taken prisoner or to
restore honour to his family or his clan. Each of us can
obtain the firearm used by Neil in the Dead Poets Society…;
the grenade with which the Japanese committed suicide
following their defeat at Iwo Jima in March 1945, after 40
days of heroic combat. Each of us, we know that we can
drown ourselves, hang ourselves, gas ourselves, use a
supply of lithium, borrow arsenic from the pharmacist
Homais as Emma Bovary did; drink opium like Chatterton de
Vigny when pursued by his creditors, refusing the
humiliating services of a valet - he who dreamed of being a
poet. Each of us knows how to find poison, the right
barbiturate, pesticides and, if necessary, “recipes” like those
available in Suicide, mode d’emploi [Suicide, User Guide] by
Claude Guillon and Yves le Bonniec. Each of us knows where
to find a razor blade, a shard of glass or something else…
and why not – with terrible, infinite imagination as in the
The Suicide, the play written in 1928 by Nicolaï Erdmann - a
sausage… mistaken for a revolver!
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“Even if the gods are plotting against us and the planets

are disorganised, even if the earth disappears from under
our feet, we will always need to have a problem” (Frances
Lear, The Second Seduction)
Suicide is a right. For Nietzsche (Human, All too

Human): “There is a certain right which permits us take a
man’s life, but no right to deprive him of death.” Stevens
notes that in the psychiatrist Fuller Torrey’s book The Death
of Psychiatry (1974), he writes: “People have the right to kill
themselves if they so wish.” In 1968, in his book Why
Suicide?, the psychologist Eustace Chesser wrote:”The right
to chose the time and manner of one’s death seems to me to
be an inalienable right. […] My opinion is that the right to die
is the last and greatest of man’s rights.” For Schopenhauer
whose father, Henri Floris, died when Schopenhauer was 18
years old (and even today one wonders whether he
accidentally fell or deliberately jumped from an attic into the
canal situated behind the house in Hamburg): “There is
nothing in the world to which a person has a more
inalienable right than his own life and his own person.” For
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the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz: “Suicide is a fundamental

right. […] Society does not have the moral right to intervene
by force against a decision to commit this act.” (The
Untamed Tongue, 1990). Lawrence Stevens added to these
statements upholding the right to suicide: “In a truly free
society, you are master of your own life; your only obligation
is to respect the rights of others. I firmly believe that each
person has the right to be considered as his own master, the
sole possessor of his own life. I therefore think that a person
who commits suicide is well within his rights so long as he
remains within the limits of his private life without menacing
the security of others. […] So long as the person in question
does not violate the rights of others, his autonomy has more
value than just implementing what some consider as rational
or others think is in his best interest. In a free society where
the right to be one’s own master is recognised, the danger
to oneself is irrelevant. To recall the words of the title of a
film in which Richard Dreyfuss played a role: Whose Life Is
It, Anyway? The first of man’s rights is the right to “self-
ownership”: it means the right to life, and the right to end
life. The supreme test is whether one accepts or not the
right to commit suicide, revealing whether this person truly
believes in “self-ownership” and in the individual liberty
which is an indissociable part of him.”
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The main thing – and this is not the most simple – is to

think about suicide when there are no consequences
involved. In these circumstances then, as Cioran said:”The
thought of suicide is a thought which helps one to live.”
One must consider suicide when one cannot commit this

act. Like Primo Lévy, the author of If This is a Man, who
never thought of suicide whilst in the Nazi camps during the
Second World War. Thinking about suicide meant committing
suicide because it was so easy to kill oneself. Couldn’t one
just run towards the electrified barbed wire and get shot
down by the guards who were trained for precisely this role?
“I was close to the idea of suicide - before and after the
camp. But never inside the camp!” wrote Primo Lévy. The
point was to consider suicide when circumstances simply
made it impossible. This is in fact a tautology since by
definition he who commits suicide doesn’t think. To reason
as Liebniz does, he doesn’t debate on it – or rather, he no
longer debates – with himself. It is because I think that I do
not commit suicide. But at the same time, it’s because I
thought of suicide that I can commit suicide. I obviously
- 24 -
exclude here, and in what follows, the suicides which are

more related to negotiated suicides.
I think of Socrates, condemned by the Layman’s Court to

commit suicide by drinking hemlock; of his words reported
to us by Plato: “If one looks at it from this point of view
(Socrates was speaking of religion), perhaps it is not
unreasonable to say that one must not commit suicide
before God requires us to do so, as He does of me today.”
But I think of Cato too who, opposed to Caesar, spears
himself with his sword at Utica after the defeat of Thapsus. A
two-part suicide - like shooting oneself in the head twice.
Because Cato did not succeed in killing himself the first time.
When the doctor came to him to stitch up the “noble wound”
- as Virgil and Horace praised it and as told in the
Encyclopaedia of Death (agora.qc.ca) - Cato sent him away.
Tearing at his entrails with his own hands, “he opened his
wound even more, so much so that within the hour his spirit
had departed from him.” I think of Seneca, a contemporary
of Jesus. “Compromised in the conspiracy by Pison in 65, as
described in the Encyclopaedia of Death, Seneca committed
suicide by opening his veins and drinking poison on the
orders of Nero.” Anecdotally, his last words were to ask for
- 25 -
freedom for all his slaves. Other last words – those of

Socrates. As Plato tells us in the Phaedo: “[L]ifting his veil,
because he had veiled his head, Socrates’ last words were:
“Criton, we owe a cock to Asclepius – pay him, don’t forget.”
This was obviously not about giving a cock to a neighbour
but… sacrificing a cock to the God of medicine. “Yes, this will
be done,” said Criton, who nevertheless seemed to be
disappointed, “but don’t you have anything else to say to
us?” “[Socrates] did not reply to this question, but a few
moments later, he had a convulsion. The man uncovered
him: his eyes were lifeless. Seeing this, Criton closed
Socrates’ mouth and his eyes. Thus died our friend […], a
man who, we can say, was the best, the wisest and the most
honest among those whom we knew at the time.”
In Antiquity, as Wikipedia reports, “suicide was

committed after a defeat in battle to avoid capture and
possible torture, mutilation or being enslaved by the enemy.
[…] During the second Punic war Sophonisba, the
Carthaginian princess, poisoned herself to avoid the fate of
the defeated and be led to Rome to figure in Scipion’s
triumph. […] Brutus and Cassius, who assassinated Julius
Caesar, committed suicide following their defeat at the battle
- 26 -
of Philippi (in Macedonia) – a battle won by Octavius and

Anthony. […] Cleopatra VII, the last Queen of Egypt, ended
her days to avoid being led as a prisoner to Rome.”
Montaigne cites Pelagia and Sophronia who were both
canonised; [one] threw herself into the river with her mother
and sisters to avoid a group of a few soldiers and [the other]
also killed herself to avoid the forces of the Emperor
Maxence.” Similarly, the Jews at Massada committed suicide
in 74 B.C. to escape being enslaved by the Romans.
“In Roman society, as we continue to see in Wikipedia,

suicide was an accepted form of preserving one’s honour.
For example, those who were tried for capital crimes could
avoid confiscation of their family goods and properties by
committing suicide before the court rendered its judgement.
[...] Domitien, the Roman Emperor, demonstrated his pity
and the divine mercy of love by allowing a condemned man
to commit suicide.” Rommel was condemned by Hitler
following the failed attempt on his life on July 20, 1944 –
Rommel could either commit suicide (in which case his death
would be explained as death following war wounds), or be
presented before the People’s Court (the Court which would
judge and execute him as a traitor).
- 27 -
The phrase by Elsa Triolet could be applied here: “Every

suicide is a murder!”
To confirm that one is in the presence of a suicide, death

must the object of the act and not simply one of its
consequences. From the Latin word suicidium, and the verb
sui caedere, “massacring oneself”, committing suicide, (as
we read in Wikipedia), is an indisputably deliberate act of
ending one’s own life. “A suicide attack, for example, would
be considered more as an act of terrorism or form of
martyrdom (depending on who is speaking) rather than a
suicide. If a suicide has legal consequences, it must
generally be proved that there was intent and death for the
act to be qualified as such in law.”
- 28 -
We will leave aside a number of cases. Assisted suicides,

like acts of euthanasia, which are generally completely
justified by the will of patients physically unable to kill
themselves. But also suicides for reasons of physically
insupportable pain, or the perspective of certain unbearable
suffering or, more simply, anticipated distress. As in
Maupassant’s novel A Coward where the hero Signolès,
following a sleepless night thinking about the duel that he
will be facing the following morning, commits suicide by
shooting himself in the throat.
Lawrence Stevens tells the story of Suzy Szasz, a victim

of lupus (an illness that derives its name from the Venetien
mask of lesions that appear on the face), who writes in her
book Living With It: Why You Don’t Have To Be Healthy To
Be Happy following a major advance in the disease during
which she contemplates suicide: “As the philosophers of
Antiquity correctly remarked, I have discovered that the
simple liberty of being able to commit suicide can be of great
help.” “When existence becomes such a burden, death
appears as a welcome refuge.” (Herodotus).
- 29 -
One must leave aside the bogus suicides like those who
destroy themselves gradually by using drugs, through
alcohol (its excesses, of course); like Alain Leroy, the hero in
Louis Malle’s film The Fire Within - a production inspired by
the novel by Pierre Drieu La Rochelle and the life of Jacques
Rigault, author of this sentence: “Life is not worth making
the effort to leave it.” It is true that, coming from a
surrealist writer… Other bogus suicides – suicides like Scott
Fitzgerald. Without saying that he really “committed
suicide”, Scott Fitzgerald knew he had a weak heart so slept
on his left side to end his life. In Buffet Froid by Bertand
Blier, Jean Rougerie asks Depardieu to commit a murder;
the chosen victim is none other than the person making the
request! Another form – The Grande Bouffe (Blowout) by
Marco Ferreri. The story of a collective, gastronomical
suicide. Booed at Cannes – the film also wanted to be an
indictment of the consumer society – Philippe Noiret retorted
to the critics: “We were offering a mirror to people and they
didn’t like what they saw in it. It reveals bloody
extraordinary stupidity.” (sic!). We also leave aside all the
suicides based on what we could call the organisation of
one’s own sabotage! Refusal to accept treatment when
severely ill, certain accidents or taking extreme risks… Like
Virginia Woolf, these people every day insist on putting into
- 30 -
their pockets the stones which will carry them down the
river.
The suicides that we are speaking about are those

committed or wanting to be committed by people who can
no longer tolerate something in life. In Tel Quel, Paul Valéry
shows that suicide is generally due to what he calls “his
victim” not being able to destroy in themselves an idea that
causes them suffering and which they believe can only be
eliminated by eliminating their own life.
This can concern private life, it can concern professional

life. The common factor: existence appears absurd for the
metaphysical reasons and psychological suffering which it
implies. “For an observer, explains Lawrence Stevens,
suicide can appear to be something harmful for the person
ending their life. But this is not how the person committing
suicide sees the situation. People commit suicide because
they believe that continuing their existence in such
conditions is a greater evil than staying alive. […]”. For
- 31 -
Frances Lear, then a magazine director and writer, quoted

by Lawrence Stevens: “One does not take the exit lightly.
Suicide has numerous consequences. It will hurt those who
love you, it can dirty the sidewalk; but its intention, its
magnetism is that it is the only guarantee for ending,
exploding, dynamiting a critical mass of suffering. Suicide,
reduced to its most simple expression, is a system of
deliverance which leads us from pain to the absence of
pain.” (The Second Seduction) For Eustace Chesser, who
was a psychiatrist: “Suicide is a deliberate refusal to accept
the only conditions in which it is possible for us to live.”
(Why Suicide?) Stevens concludes: “Who can therefore
reasonably pretend that a suicidal person has taken the
wrong decision in terms of danger to oneself?”
Who holds the truth, if truth there is? Karl Popper

refused this notion which yesterday was pertinent and today
is imbecile. If the question of truth was the question for the
Greeks – “under what conditions is truth possible?” asked
Socrates – Kant had already indicated that this question was
much too ambitious. He had substituted another question for
the question about truth: “Under what conditions is
knowledge possible?” Karl Popper ended this debate (the
- 32 -
final straw!). Believing that the question by Kant was also

too ambitious, Popper substituted yet another question:
“Under what conditions is progress possible?” Popper thus
ceases to speak about truth – it is clearly no longer present.
At the most, he says, one can lean towards the truth. In
order to mark this new way of thinking, he created a word:
verisimilitude, i.e. the approximation of the truth. For
questions about suffering, this approximation of the truth
concerns the men and women who suffer because they are
the ones who experience it. For Bachelard, the “I am” is
stronger than “I think”. The body that acts is stronger than
the “cogito”. Who better can feel the pain of another person
than the person themselves? We are already unable to
remember, I mean physically, what a headache is – I did not
say headstrong ;-) – when, in fact, we no longer have a
headache… “The idea, wrote Stevens, of knowing if it is
better to accept an existing, wretched situation in the hope
of a better future is only a value judgement.”
Someone who commits suicide is above all unhappy –

even if, of course, this word unhappy (“badness”) can lead
to many interpretations.
- 33 -
“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to roll a rock,

without stopping, to the summit of a mountain where it
would fall back under its own weight. They thought with
some justification that there was no punishment more
terrible than useless effort and no hope.” (Camus, The myth
of Sisyphus). Like Sisyphus nobody today, in their own
stress “between human calling and the world’s unreasonable
silence” can say that one must “think happy” - the time is
long past when other than one’s task, as Camus argued, the
only thing that mattered was the sense that one could give
to one’s actions. What mattered to someone who commits
suicide, wrote the authors of the Elegy of Well-being at
Work, is also unhappy that the stone he rolls and under
which he will allow himself to fall when, no longer able to
endure the suffering, the only solution he sees is to abandon
his task.
For the person who commits suicide: “All, henceforward, is

vain.” “Too weak in life to continue on the path”, he gives
up. “Tomorrow, wrote Camus, (The Myth of Sisyphus)
everything will change, tomorrow. Suddenly, he discovers
that tomorrow will be similar, and the day after tomorrow,
- 34 -
and all the other days. And this irreversible discovery

destroys him.” “If every second of our life must be repeated
an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as
Jesus Christ was to the cross” Milan Kundera (The
Unbearable Lightness of Being). Here lies the dread of
understanding what Nietzsche meant by the eternal return
of the identical (identity!)…
One must be Montaigne to think that “all the

disadvantages in life are not worth wanting to die for in
order to avoid them.”
“By waiting and waiting, said Epicure, we use up our life

and we die from the effort.”
“It is ideas like this which make you die. Being unable to
bear them, one kills oneself […]” (Camus, Betwixt and
Between). That too has changed. Today, man is aware of
- 35 -
this. “Yesterday when, at each step, the hope of success

could support man, wrote Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus),
today he is aware that there is no hope. It’s then that his
destiny changes dramatically and becomes tragic.”
Camus continues: “It can happen that the surroundings

fall apart. Get up, tramway, four hours in the office or
factory, meal, tramway, four hours of work, meal, sleep and
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and
Saturday with the same rhythm; this path is easily followed
most of the time. But one day the “why” comes into the
mind and everything begins with this lassitude […]”
For Camus (The Rebel), the person committing suicide

contrasts with the person condemned to death. He revolts.
For the former, the suicide, the end justifies the means. For
the latter, the condemned person, it is the means which
justify the end. And here is a paradox. Whereas the person
committing suicide does not believe in death and cannot
bear his life, it is because the rebel believes in death that he
- 36 -
can endure his own life, as we have seen with Lacan at the
start. Here too is why, often, trade unionists for example get
better results… “In the daily grind in which we live, wrote
Camus, (The Rebel), revolt plays the same role as the
“cogito” in the order of thinking: this is the first obvious fact.
But this fact draws the individual from his solitude. It is a
common realm which combines all men through the first
value. I revolt, therefore we are.”
“The rebel, wrote Camus, does an about-turn in the

etymological sense. He acted in response to the master’s
whip. Now he faces him. He opposes that which is preferable
to that which is not.” As for Prometheus, “the first act of
modern conquerors is a claim by man against his destiny”
Camus continues. “By the force of conscience, [he]
transforms into a rule of life what was an invitation to
death.”
§
Raymond Bellour and François Ewald, in their work with
Deleuze on Spinoza (“Signs and Event”, the Literary
Magazine, 1988), show that if he does not revolt, the person
- 37 -
committing suicide is the one who is inevitably overcome by

external factors.
The only coherent revolt – is suicide!
“It is therefore basically through helplessness, they

write, [that a man] commits suicide or rather is led by
external conditions to turn his own hand against himself. […]
One commits suicide when the vital force is overcome by the
force of sad passions. […] Because although Spinoza said
that suicide comes from the outside, even a potential suicide
must always define himself through the effort required to
persevere in his being. But for him, persevering in his being
is apparently only possible when he leaves life. Perhaps this
(the death of the Body) is a means, the only means possible,
to stop the constant decline in his power to react? Therefore
the only way for a potential suicide to act instead of to
suffer.”
- 38 -
“Nobody […] commits suicide without being obliged by

external sources […].” (Spinoza, Ethics) Today, in too many
companies, to feed on external circumstances - the most
violent psychic wounds always come from inside
communities that, a priori, are the most normal, said Lacan -
many men and women in companies, but also in
administrations, communities, “because they no longer
believe in anything, because they feel denied, even deny
themselves, as the authors of the Elegy of Well-being at
Work wrote, they finish by giving up. They renounce. And –
here is the paradox – in renouncing because they can no
longer influence the exterior world, because they are
inhibited to act (as Laborit said), they will commit suicide.
This is what suicide means for them. It is their sole idea and
paradoxically the only solution at the final moment, to
retake control of their destiny. To finally succeed in deciding
and acting. Yes, to commit suicide, but to finally make a
decision”.
“His future, wrote Camus, his only, terrible future which

he discerns and rushes after”.
- 39 -
“Like in these Italian museums, wrote Camus (The Myth

of Sisyphus) where one can see the little painted screens
that the priest held in front of the faces of the condemned to
hide the scaffold from them”, we, everyone in the company,
we are afraid. And because we are all afraid, each person
develops their own defence mechanism.
§
“Will we one day get away from this blind form of
management, write the authors of the Elegy of Well-being at
Work, which requires that in response to a decision taken by
an n something, n-1 simply passes the request on to n-2
who in turn passes on this request? Everybody shares the
same fear of not knowing what to do (this is also true for the
manager who must meet shareholders’ demands, the
demands made of politicians…). Everyone develops defence
mechanisms which simply cumulate as they spread
throughout the company.”
- 40 -
The first defence mechanism - fear can be internalized,

each person then retreats behind their desk, behind their
professional tools; fear can be externalized – this opens the
door to violence, vexation, humiliation.
Today’s employee gives up his arms in the spittle cell

which constricts him. “The spittle cell, wrote Camus (The
Fall), was a bricked-up box in which the prisoner was held
upright but could not move. The solid door which enclosed
him in his cement shell reached up to his chin. One therefore
only saw his face which each prison guard copiously spat
upon. The prisoner, wedged in his cell, could not wipe
himself. It is true that he could shut his eyes.”
This then is the door open to moral harassment. “All

together, but on our knees, head bowed.” (Camus, The Fall)
- 41 -
Moral harassment that is always, always, always a form

of sexual harassment!
Another defence mechanism: protect oneself from the

suffering that is created. Each person fashions themselves to
become deaf to complaints, blind to the suffering of others.
Working in “discomfort”! Discomfort was this cell in the

dungeon during the Middle Ages. “In general, wrote Camus
(The Fall), you were forgotten for life. This cell was different
to others because of its ingenious dimensions. It was not
high enough to remain standing, not wide enough to lie
down. One had to adopt a protective attitude, live
diagonally; sleep was a fall, awakening a crouching position.
[…] Every day, due to the permanent confines which
numbed his body, the prisoner learnt that he was guilty and
that innocence consisted of joyously stretching himself.”
- 42 -
“To die proudly when it is no longer possible to live

proudly” (Nietzsche)
“In these games of the modern circus, wrote the authors

of the Elegy of Well-being at Work, where the worker-
gladiator can go to the extreme of surrendering his life in
order to win, we wanted to economise on intelligence in
order to always prefer this same, unreasonable silence […]
in the world of work. We wanted to go the quickest way, the
fastest way, we believed that […] it was only necessary to
control everything [to rule over everything]. But this does
not apply and, worse than anything, it is indeed death that
we have sown within the company.”
Do not be mistaken - the authors of the Elegy of Well-

being at Work highlight this - in the company where one
counts the number of deaths, there is always a co-
responsibility of management, the unions, even company
doctors and others who could be involved… One should also
- 43 -
be aware, as Camus wrote, “if the same day a friend of the

distressed person did not speak to him in an uncaring
manner. He is then the guilty one. Because this can suffice
to hasten all the resentment and all the weariness still in the
background…” Above all, it shows profound respect to the
employees who commit suicide to say this; there is also a
co-responsibility on their part….
The first person responsible is the man, the woman who

commits suicide because of the gesture that they assume!
“Death is solitary whereas servitude is collective”

(Camus, The Fall)
“He who commits suicide would have wanted to live.”

(Schopenhauer)
- 44 -
“To choose oneself the moment when one wants to

leave this world, wrote Camus, when no remedy for suffering
exists other than death - that is the supreme dignity.” “The
question, explains Werther to Albert (The Sorrows of Young
Werther), as Baldine Saint Girons recalls in the Dictionary of
Philosophy, is not to know whether one is weak or strong,
but if one can stand the weight of suffering.” As Stevens
suggest, one can “legitimately decide that this future, better
than one hopes, cannot be a justification for an unbearable
present.” In a certain sense, Camus continues, he who
commits suicide is taking his revenge. “It’s the way of
proving that he will not be subjugated!” For Nietzsche
(Human, All too Human), one must respect both the person
committing suicide and the act itself. This is also why, as
stated in the Elegy for Well-being at Work, “one must not
feel too much anger against people who commit suicide…”
Yes, one must realize how not to hold it against them too
much…
- 45 -
Not all authors share the same point of view on knowing

whether the potential suicide thinks (i.e. at the moment of
his gesture) - I do not believe this. In his work Suicide: The
Forever Decision already quoted, the psychologist Paul
Quinnett, as Lawrence Stevens reminds us, wrote: “I have
spoken to hundreds of potential suicides. If I succeeded in
guessing what went on in their [head] and [in their] heart, I
am sure that I would hear [them] debating a long inner
dialogue on the question of living or […] not living.” As Lacan
says: “No question ever relies on a single answer.
[Prolonged silence] That is certain. [Prolonged silence] One
only asks a question when there is already an answer. Which
appears to considerably limit the extent of the questions.
[Prolonged silence] Fortunately or unfortunately [prolonged
silence], the answers are different for each person.
[Prolonged silence] This is the obstacle to what one so
benevolently calls… communication.” “When one has the
right answer, wrote Pierre Rey, the question, suddenly
emptied of all substance, loses its raison d’être and
disappears of its own accord.”
A person who commits suicide does not prepare two

columns, the “plus” and the “minus”. Suicide is no longer a
- 46 -
question for the person who commits it. If there are

questions, they are amongst the people around him… It’s
even less a subject for debate, it’s the response. In his book
Suicide, Paul Grollman writes: “Suicide does not just happen
all of a sudden, impulsively and unforeseen.” For Lawrence
Stevens: “[The suicide is] accomplished after long reflection
in the framework of [the victim’s] efforts to negotiate with
what [one] considers to be intolerable living conditions.”
When Bruno Bettelheim committed suicide at the age of

86, it was anything but a surprise. In a recording made
about ten years earlier, he announced his suicide. “The day
that I can no longer think, or I can no longer write…”
Bettelheim, whose life and whose death were marked by
three major confinements. Like Primo Lévy, like millions of
others, he too was interned in the camps (in Dachau and
then Buchenwald)… first confinement! His spent his
professional life working on autism… second confinement!
The method of his suicide: a suicide, as we have seen, by
enclosing his head in a plastic bag… third confinement! For
Odile Odoul, as one can read on Agora (agora.qc.ca), the
death of Bruno Bettelheim is an act of liberty in accordance
with his convictions. “He committed suicide perhaps just
- 47 -
because, at an advanced age and physically weak, this

ability to think freely deserted him. […] It is less an act of
desperation than the courage to pursue his principles about
life to the end.”
For Gilles Deleuze, same causes, same… effects. Richard

Pinhas, a musician, producer and composer, thinks that
Deleuze, suffering from a serious respiratory illness (he had
already contracted tuberculosis when very young)
“accomplished [through his suicide] a final, great act of
freedom, the last one possible.” “Death as the only reality
[when], committing suicide [reaching his mysterious number
as Jaspers said], means sealing his destiny. […] It’s clinging
on until the end, Camus tells us – what Seneca (before
Satre) called the road of freedom.” “When one is confronted
by permanent pain, continues Richard Pinhas, and a machine
is breathing for you, one cannot last for a long time. Deleuze
had just published “Pure Immanence: Essays on Life” in the
journal Philosophy – the last text published in his lifetime.
Only “The real and the virtual”, which he wrote just before
throwing himself out of a window, was published
afterwards.” Deleuze like Bettelheim had, in his meetings
with Claire Parnet (The Primer of Gilles Deleuze), stated the
- 48 -
evidence of suicide as a necessary ending. “The major

thinkers, Nietzsche, Spinoza have delicate health. Weak
health, explained Deleuze for the letter M for Malade in his
Primer, is favourable to thinking. Not that one listens to
one’s own life but to think is to listen to life. […] I believe
that fragile health encourages this sort of listening. […] One
cannot think if one is not in a field that is a little beyond your
strength, i.e. which makes you fragile.”
“In a certain way, these important authors [and this is

true for all those who commit suicide], continues Deleuze,
have seen something too big – so big that, for them, it was
too much.”
“When a bird that is bred has been captured, it does not

struggle! wrote Montherlant in La Reine Morte” [The Queen
Dead].
- 49 -
Bettelheim, Deleuze, same (non-) combat! In dying by

their own hand, they experienced what is great in man, what
is “a bridge and not an end; what one can appreciate in
man, as Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, is that
he is a transition and he is a decline .”
“Suicide, one can read on Wikipedia, is an act

condemned in the teachings of monotheistic religions. Even
if the fact of committing suicide is firstly an act against
oneself, the “belonging” of man’s destiny to God means that
this act becomes a break in the specific relationship between
man and God and an act which contravenes God’s
sovereignty. [To illustrate this] the Catholic viewpoint was
defined at the first ecumenical council of Braga which was
held in about 561: it states that suicide is criminal in
Christianity except for “madmen”. The first council of Braga
wished to counter pagan ways of thinking in an era still
deeply influenced by the Roman mentality where suicide [as
we have seen] was presented as a noble undertaking, an
honourable death, to be recommended to expiate a crime,
whereas Christianity wanted to espouse for itself alone the
notion of pardon, the acceptance by a criminal to submit
- 50 -
himself to justice, as the only acceptable path. [Another

example]: Islam forbids suicide and considers it a sin (even
a crime). Based on a Hadith, Mohammed apparently refused
to pray for a person who, having committed suicide, was
presented to him; he however ordered his companions to
pray for him nevertheless.”
“But the history of the Church, reports Montaigne, reveres

a number of examples of devoted people who appealed to
death as a guarantee against the excessive attacks on their
conscience that the tyrants were preparing.”
“Suicide […] is one of the grand ideas that man

possesses. But for two thousand years one prevented people
from committing suicide”, Cioran will tell us.
Leaving aside the demands that religion imposes –

“religions, wrote Nietzsche in Human, All too Human, are
- 51 -
decidedly rich in excuses to avoid the need for suicide; it’s

how they flatteringly sneak into those enamoured by life”, “it
will be permitted, continued Nietzsche, to ask oneself: why
is the reality of awaiting slow decline until decomposition
more glorious for an old man who feels his strength ebbing
away than to decide oneself on the ending, in complete
consciousness?” In this case (still Nietzsche): “Suicide is an
act which offers itself naturally and which, being a victory for
reason, should in all fairness command respect: and it was
in effect recognised [as we have seen] in those days when
the leaders of Greek philosophy and the bravest Roman
patriots usually died through suicide. Much less admirable,
on the contrary, concluded Nietzsche, was this manner of
surviving day after day with the help of doctors who were
anxiously consulted and treatments that could not have been
more painful, without the strength to move clearly towards a
legitimate end to life.” In the Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche
adds about suicide: “It shows a death which is chosen as a
need and a final resort against decadence.”
“When in Wuthering Heights, wrote Camus (The Rebel),

Heathcliff prefers his loved one to God and asks Hell to
reunite him with his true love, he is not only speaking of his
- 52 -
humiliated youth, but also the searing experience of a whole

lifetime. The same inclination causes Master Eckhart (a
Dominican theologian and philosopher), in an access
surprising of heresy, to say that he prefers Hell with Christ
rather than Heaven without him. It’s the driving force of
love.”
Even if it is not as well reasoned as for Bettelheim or

Deleuze, it is obvious that he (or she) who is going to
commit suicide will think about it beforehand. The person
has never even done anything else except to think about it.
The Eureka of Archimedes was, above all, the result of a
long reflection, not always consciously. It is never
unthinkingly that a peasant, haunted by ruin, will buy a rope
– assuming that he does not have one available in some
outhouse. But, as in marriage, - this “bureaucratised orgy,
monotonous hearse of audacity and invention” as Camus
said in The Fall – is not death, after birth and marriage, the
third important moment in life? At least that is what was
long taught in small classes at a time when one learned…
this type of thing; some made it a point of honour to wear
new clothes, and use new rope to commit suicide. It is
therefore never unthinkingly that this peasant will throw this
- 53 -
same new rope over the beam in the barn, grumbling no

doubt rightly that this rope, too new, has difficulty in looping
over the timber and allowing the noose to be tied…
“Who does one seek to kill when committing suicide?

asks Baldine Saint Girons (The Dictionary of Philosophy), a
past of which one is ashamed?, a self diminished by failure?,
a life devoid of interest?”
“Suicide allows a nebula of explanations” (Primo Levi)
Every one of us has a share of responsibility. When will

we cease to admire, write the authors of the Elegy of Well-
being at Work, those who “succeed” and who, to achieve
their success, do not hesitate to humiliate, to wound, to
rape, sometimes even sending men and women to the
clinical slaughterhouse of suicide? All this with the
unconscious orgasm at the sight of stress, even more so by
- 54 -
malevolence (as in male….!).
“The pleasure of creating suffering, wrote Nietzsche,

increases the feeling of strength and [power]. […] A desire
to destroy, the expression of an instinct even deeper than
the desire to destroy oneself: the desire for nothingness.” In
the same way, continue the authors of the Elegy of Well-
being, this fascination denounced by André Green in A
Pyschoanalyst Engaged referring to Lacan: make the patient
believe that he could become an image of him. A fascination
already highlighted in the analysis of the Banquet by Plato
and the relationship between Alcibiades and Socrates.
Fascination, more generally, “for the artist who is
emotionally unstable, the writer who dies of hunger, the
important manager, the politician, a genuine machine for
destruction, all exhibiting excessive sexuality… when, as
Joyce McDougall will show (The Many Faces of Eros…), the
part of them which allows them to create [to work] is, in
reality, the uninhibited part of the symptom!”
- 55 -
There is a cause for this gesture that only close friends

and relations could qualify as desperate, whereas for he who
commits suicide, suicide is both a reaction to a form of
despair (the person committing suicide is anything but
masochist) and, above all, a gesture of hope: anything so
long as it is ended. More precisely, a range of causes.
Remember my peasant - it is never therefore only ruin.
Conversely, and here is where it may differ, he who commits
suicide has more or less thought about it, more or less
consciously, more or less often. So suicide is never – at least
totally – an impulsive act, an unforeseen act...
... it always requires something. He who is going to commit

suicide is inevitably, for a moment, balanced on an edge. On
one side, the sunny slopes. If he stumbles, he will survive.
On the other side, shade. If he slips, he will be lost.
“As Oedipus, without realising it, first obeys destiny, his

tragedy begins at the moment he is aware of it” (Albert
Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus). If Oedipus does not commit
- 56 -
suicide, if Oedipus does not slip onto the wrong side, it is

because “at that instant, blind and despairing, he recognises
the only bond that attaches him to the world, the cool hand
of a young maiden”. Incidentally, why do you think that one
holds hands when one is 20, 40, 60 years old – all one’s
life…? It is literally to hold on to someone else. And even if I
don’t hold on so firmly… the other person, the person that I
need, also needs to hold on to me. For a hand to hold me,
or to let me go, or even push me away the day when I in
turn am on the windy ridge of life, I will have decided to kill
myself.
Like Neil, the unfortunate hero in the Dead Poets Society

by Nancy Kleinbaum, for whom a memory fleetingly brought
back a sparkle to his eyes; as in Dostoyevsky’s The Dream
of a Ridiculous Man, a person can change their opinion,
abandon the idea of suicide thanks to a small star seen in
the sky; as Lawrence Stevens says, you can easily, within
the space of a few hours or days, get up one fine morning
and declare: “I have decided not to kill myself after all.” You
can always choose which side you are on.
- 57 -
For all those who do not have this cool hand to unite
them with the world, this memory which will bring them
back to the world, “who do not have the chance of being
able to discern through the ragged clouds the impenetrable
black stains and, within them, a small star; for those,
divorced from life, more or less infirm – then, wrote
Dostoyevsky, their destiny [is sealed].”
“Suicide – the strength of those who no longer have any,

the hope of those who no longer believe, the sublime
courage of the conquered.” (Maupassant)
The internal ravages are visible in some people. The

weariness of their life is palpable. “I will end up killing
myself…”, “I would prefer death…”, “I want to get it all over
with…”, “My birthright has been stolen, I will not allow my
right to death to be stolen…” They can reject the
responsibility: “You what me to die or what?”, “If I shoot
- 58 -
myself, you’ll have it on your conscience”… as François

Cluzet said in Claude Chabrol’s Hell. It can be a phrase… a
phrase on its own, spoken aloud: “I can understand that
someone wants to kill themselves…” It can be a recall
(unless indeed it is a call) of what they believe to be a bad
omen. It is Anna Karenina (Tolstoy’s hero) who, thinking
that her lover Vronski was leaving her, throws herself under
a train; Anna Karenina who, at the start of the novel, was
witness to an accident… in St. Petersburg station. As too in
The Fall by Camus – a fiction also built around suicide.
§
For others it can be invisible – like the fanatics who
believe all is well as Lacan called them, the close relatives of
“There are no problems, only solutions” so many of which
exist in the world today. “Just before committing the act,
most of my friends who died through suicide, wrote Pierre
Rey (A season at Lacan’s), showed external signs of stability
and desperately insisted that everything was alright.” Like a
child following a psychotherapy – he too a fanatic who
believes all is well - whom the therapist asks at the start of
each session how he is feeling. The child inevitably answers
“very well”. A “very well” that means: I beg you please,
please be sure to find nothing!” Like this other fanatic who
believes all is well, a friend of Pierre Rey (one does wonder
whether he attracted such people) - a friend who clearly
would commit suicide – “He called me a number of times
- 59 -
[that is what is important – “a number of times”], thanked

me, told me that he was contented and that everything was
alright.”
The fanatics who believe all is well, candidates destined

for suicide, beings for death, as wheat is against the scythe,
the scythe against the hammer (one knows the song…)
these people only really show as much as they wish to hide!
When certain behaviour is too obvious, it may be that it

is hiding something completely different. As an (almost
frivolous) example, let us imagine Arthur, 40 years old,
married for 20 (these 20 years of marriage are important to
understand this). So Arthur, 40 and still married for 20
years, goes home but later, much later than usual. To be
forgiven – or at least that is what we can suppose as we are
obviously not in Arthur’s thoughts – he arrives with a bunch
of flowers. He does not keep these flowers for himself but
offers them to his wife and in offering them (one always
overdoes it) says something to her which is not in fact
- 60 -
untrue, and says it more than once (I insisted that one

always overdoes it!): “I love you, I love you, I love you…”
What do you think Celeste understands by this? (Celeste is,
of course, his wife’s name). Celeste who has not received
any flowers from Arthur for the last 20 years (that’s why the
part about the 20 years is important) – since the day which
she understandably remembers, when Arthur asked her if
she would marry him. Celeste, who now thinks that she
would have been more fortunate if she had broken a leg that
day, no longer knew if Arthur could decline a simple verb like
“to love”. What is Celeste thinking? “Too much is too much!”
Arthur must be hiding something. And this something is
called Thing, or Creature… whatever. That this “something”
is only just 18 years old is unimportant… or matters little. No
matter that “it” was met in the computer department where
she was working on her third-year apprenticeship (she was
no doubt a bit behind in her studies but this was
compensated for elsewhere; at least, and more likely, she
does not appear her age…). And finally, the idea that Arthur
may be prepared to renounce his family for this young lady
and live his crisis at the age of forty is simply a fact of life…
Let us leave here “the unbearable levity of the being”,
- 61 -
dear to Kundera, and return to these people who loudly

proclaim that they are happy - but happiness which is
exaggerated (in fact very exaggerated) has obviously never
made anyone happy. Continuing with what was written by
Pierre Rey: “[They] would simply die. Until [they] kill
themselves, nobody would have been able to suspect the
weight of the past shadow that obliterated their life. [They
had] mobilised their strength for a combat lost in advance
against an invisible adversary. Their method of dying finally
demonstrated this: too late. Death preceded diagnosis. To
have one, it was necessary to pay with the other. […]
Someone can be covered in women and still feel cold.” Like
Marilyn, bursting with happiness in the photos taken a few
days before her death – we can be covered with men and
here too be very, very, very cold.
« I am happy, I am happy, I’m telling you, I forbid you

not to think that that I am happy, I am dying with
happiness!” (Camus, The Fall)
Can one hear these people who will commit suicide if one
- 62 -
is not a psychologist, if one does not have an analytical

ear…? And again, only if these faculties can be exploited. As
Lacan said (and we can now also anticipate the prolonged
silences): “For a certain time one was able to believe that
psychoanalysts knew something but [prolonged silence] this
was not very widespread. [Prolonged silence] The height of
it all was that they did not believe in it themselves.
[Prolonged silence] But they were wrong in this. [Prolonged
silence] Because, in fact they knew some of it. [Prolonged
silence] Only, [prolonged silence] exactly as for the
unconscious of which this is the true definition, they didn’t
know what they knew.”
These people who will commit the act, who don’t know
what they know…, they can be recognised by their smile… an
enigmatic smile. Exactly the same enigmatic smile as the
Mona Lisa!
The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile is the Unknown Woman

in the Seine, this body recovered from the river, already
- 63 -
dead. An employee at the morgue, struck by the young

woman’s beauty and the happy expression in her smile,
made a plaster mould of her face, tearing off the sores
before their time, at the very start of the XXth. century.
The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile is the smile on the lips

of the automobile worker, an employee who was laid off and
who, after visiting the Employment Centre – a Centre that
one knows, however much “Employment Centre” it
represents, has only ever offered a crumb of good
conscience for the company, a lot of money for consultants,
an infinite suffering for the now ex-employees – leaves the
counsellor saying simply “thank you…” This worker who will
be found a few days later, lying below a viaduct.
There are, like this one, places that are known… known
for being places like cemeteries where animals come to die,
where one commits suicide! Pierre Delvot, in his “Study of
suicide by precipitation off the Loire Atlantic bridge” (one is
precise or one is not…) shows that there are iconic bridges,
- 64 -
easy to access, known by the public and the media as being

sites used for suicides. Bridges carrying strong symbols like
beauty and strength. They only lack… wisdom!
Bridges where all the smiles have disappeared. Bridges

like the Pont des Arts (we’ve left the Loire Atlantic) where
John-Baptiste Clamence, the hero in Camus’ The Fall, hears
an immense gust of laughter: a laugh which returns up the
river two or three years after the suicide he witnessed when
on the Pont Royal one night in November. “I had gone onto
the Pont des Arts […] to look at the river which was barely
visible in the night. […] I was about to light a cigarette […]
when at that instant, a laugh broke out behind me. […] I
went to the railings […] I heard the laugh behind me, a bit
further away, as it floated down the river. I remained
immobile. The laugh faded but I still distinctly heard it
behind me, coming from nowhere but the water. […] Then,
soon, I heard nothing more. I returned to the river bank. […]
That evening, I called a friend who was not at home. I
hesitated about going out when suddenly I heard the laugh
beneath my windows. […] I went to the bathroom to drink a
glass of water. My reflection smiled in the mirror, but it
seemed to me that my smile was double.” (Camus, The
- 65 -
Fall).
Two or three years before, therefore… “I returned to the

Left Bank and then home by the Pont Royal. It was one
o’clock after midnight. […] On the bridge, I passed behind a
shape leaning on the parapet, apparently looking at the
river. Closer, I made out the form of a young woman
dressed in black. […] I continued on my way. […] I had
already gone about another fifty metres when I heard a
noise which, despite the distance, seemed incredible in the
silence of the night - a body hitting the water.” (Camus, The
Fall)
Similar to the letter stolen from Edgar Poe that no-one

had seen when it was lying there on the desk; the Mona
Lisa, if one looks at the background, shows that she was
painted on a promontory, leaning against what is perhaps
the parapet of a bridge – a parapet that is also called a
barrier…
- 66 -
§
The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile is Dieter’s smile, saying
farewell as he left for Dublin. Dieter whom we found hanged.
Three days later!
The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile is this “strange air” of

Van Gogh which had struck Gaugin so much at Arles and
about which he confided to Emile Schuffenecker, a friend
who was also a painter. “Whilst he was sitting in front of a
window, recalls Pierre Rey, something had alerted him: he
turned round and saw Van Gogh standing in the open
doorway looking at him with a bizarre expression, a razor in
his hand!” An expression of the unconscious, the laugh of
the Mona Lisa - Gaugin confides in Schuffenecker about Van
Gogh’s strange air; Schuffenecker whom one knows will one
day be suspected of having painted forgeries – forgeries of
Van Gogh!
The Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile is the smile which hides
- 67 -
the other’s vacant look. A look, as Pierre Rey says, which

shows nothing. Smile… and look into space! A smile which
calms and makes one uncomfortable. Uncomfortable
because the candidate for suicide shows what I call “the
burdensome friendship”. It “sticks”. Not like the firm friend
or the good companion who sticks, but someone whom you
feel wants to be your friend when on the contrary you wish –
without really saying so or, later, after his suicide – to keep
your distance. He even sometimes evokes a form of fear.
Pierre Rey gives a precise description of this uncomfortable
feeling, about this friend whom he called “the Fat One”. “The
pathetic desire to communicate, dinners where he arrived
his arms full of bottles and food. Everything about him said
“love me” and everything about him generated a sort of
distrust which kept him away from the others. [That’s
exactly it. As I say, they are the burdensome friendship. You
invite him, he speaks only about himself and at the same
time says nothing – just empty words!]. In company, Rey
continues, he was nobody, clumsy. He created an empty
zone of anxiety around him. […] This king behaved like a
muzhik. He spread uneasiness.”
The laugh of the Mona Lisa when, paradoxically, it must

not be misinterpreted; “one can feel that instant in the
- 68 -
relationship with this other person, Rey writes, when

harbouring all the violence of his animal instinct, he wants to
kill you.” It is also like the feeling “that your life, your
success can be wounded by a ricochet.” The uneasiness in
his presence can be such that “it is necessary to space out
the meetings.”
The Mona Lisa is he, is she (and this is what matters) -

who will commit suicide!
The laugh of the Mona Lisa - the enigmatic smile of the

person who will commit suicide is contagious.
Like family precedents – this can be used as an example

if close relations have committed suicide – there exists a
fashion for suicide even if it is difficult to accept… “The
supreme drama, write the authors of The Elegy of Well-being
at Work, is precisely that - people who thought of suicide
- 69 -
(or rather who always refused to think about it for a lack of

courage, for fear of abandoning their loved ones) then
committed suicide, as if drawn to it by previous suicides. As
if it could be socially more acceptable – somehow more
dignified – to commit suicide for what would be blamed on
the evident failure to support working conditions and not
other, more secretive reasons which are perhaps also seen
as being more cowardly”.
At the end of the XVIIIth. century, The Sorrows of Young

Werther was widely acclaimed but led to a wave of suicides
in Germany.
§
One can find wisdom, strength and beauty in the
suicides of others when committing suicide oneself; to follow
in the steep trails of “these first suicides who showed a
difficult path on which they were the first to tread.”
- 70 -
Cato, Plutarch tells us, twice read Phaedon (which

relates the death of Socrates), the same night that he died
by his own hand.
It is but an immense laugh that breaks through from

behind the illusion of the Mona Lisa’s enigmatic smile! A
laugh which seems to tease the crowd, those who now weep
for the dead. A laugh that echoes their impotence to help the
one who was going kill himself, to have been able to save
him after he had gone. “Almost immediately, I heard a cry,
repeated several times, which also flowed down the river
then abruptly ceased. […] I wanted to run and I didn’t move.
[…] I have forgotten what I thought then. “Too late, too
far…, or something like that.” (Camus, The Fall)
How does one restrain a friend who is sliding away from

life? Tell him what we are feeling? If necessary, talk about
death? Open the door and say: “Are you alright…?” Or, as
Montaigne suggested, put forward the stoic theory of “the
reasonable exit”, the duty to live in the service of others?
- 71 -
To save them, one must be odious with them.

Bellow the four truths at them. To say nothing means
disgrace. “Nothing troubles if one speaks about it.”
(Dolto)
To save them, one needs to know how to take the

time. “It’s the time you wasted on your rose that makes
your rose so important.” (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)
The story of The Fall… Jean-Baptiste Clamence, it’s Jean-

Baptiste crying out in the desert; it’s the Mona Lisa’s laugh
that reminds us, those of us who have seen her enigmatic
smile, the smile like that of people who have committed
suicide - even if we could go back in time, we would always
arrive too late, we would always lack the courage to save
them. We would never be odious enough with them. We
- 72 -
would never take the time it needs.
The laugh of the Mona Lisa when the death of our loved
ones produces ambivalent reactions in us (Freud).
The laugh of the Mona Lisa - like Clamence, (he who

“clams”!), we could pronounce the words which for years
have not failed to resonate during his nights: “Oh maiden,
throw yourself into the water again so that I may have a
second opportunity to save us, to save us both! […] Suppose
[…] we take him at his word. Do it! Brr…! The water is so
cold! But courage! It is too late now, it will always be too
late. Fortunately!”
There remains but a trace, a word, a sentence, an act, a

condemnation, a request for pardon…, the place, the method
used. The laugh of the Mona Lisa, the enigma that remains
to be deciphered: why?
- 73 -
The enigmatic smile, “what occasions are more or less

suitable to make a man go into this state to kill
himself?” asks Montaigne.
“Suicide is a philosophical act” Primo Levi will tell us.
“[Besides], there is only one really serious philosophical

problem: suicide. To judge whether a life is worth living or
not is to answer the fundamental question of philosophy.
The rest - whether the world has three dimensions, whether
the mind has nine or twelve categories - comes afterwards.
These are games – first, one must answer. And if it is true,
as Nietzsche maintains, that a philosopher must preach
through example to be appreciated, then one understands
the importance of this answer as it will precede the ultimate
act.” (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus).
- 74 -
Of course, and this too is a part of the Mona Lisa’s laugh,

there will always be someone who, having read only the An
Essay on Suicide, condemns the short cut that they would
have liked to have seen, a call to suicide… Of course, there
will always be those who will not have read the book. No
matter – to quote Lacan: “I do not speak on behalf of idiots”
– those whom he calls (as we have seen) the “fanatics who
believe all is well”. These “fanatics who believe all is well”
who, wrote Pierre Rey, hang themselves laughing because
life, as we know, is perfect!
The Laugh of the Mona Lisa – I am now speaking of the

painting – does not of course come into what Robert Misrahi
calls tragic teachings. “One can be wary of tragic teachings.
They end by paralysing willpower. If one teaches that
humanity has no sense, that death is our main objective
(Heidegger), that all is absurd (Cioran), if we are taught all
that, it is obvious that young people will become
disenchanted. In favour of what? Of absurdity and violence.”
- 75 -
As there are those who encourage crime, Hegesias of

Cyrene – as we can read on the Wikipedia site - maintained
that happiness is not possible and that death is preferable to
life (except for the wise man to whom both are indifferent).
So he advised suicide, which led to his nickname
Peisithanatos (“he who promotes death”).
One can be surprised when speaking of death. “But when

one enjoys living, wrote Pierre Rey, how can death be
ignored when denying it means denying life? Death setting
life as the symbol of the frontier, it fixes its price and adds
its authority to enjoyment, this piece of intensity clawed
from death and from art, the enigmatic part of eternity that
is stolen from it.”
We must live our lives as if we may have to commit
- 76 -
suicide in the next five minutes. The probability of suicide

must be a wager. Like Pascal’s wager – “God is, or He is not”
– is really unimportant but, and this is the real wager, if one
believes in God, one lives more fully because one lives more
freely. Well, making the wager on suicide being probable
during one’s life is making the wager that we could live fully
because we could freely exercise this liberty and, better still,
because we could enjoy the moment.
“If we survive, as Dolto said, it is because there is

reason.” “I am sure, continued Pierre Rey, that Dolto was
speaking to us of the moment, in the fulfilment of that which
surpasses it, love, beauty, enjoyment” and other nothings.
The question must not be: “What do I risk if I fail?” but:

“What do I risk if I succeed?”
- 77 -
Like Mercier and Camier by Beckett, one must progress if

only, as Deleuze says, to verify something, a theory, an idea
that one has of where one is going. This may appear to be of
little interest, but not progressing means to die. This is the
big difference between Mercier and Camier and Waiting for
Godot. Beckett shows us in this latter novel that these are
the ravages of immobility – here one again encounters the
inhibition to act. Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for a Mr.
Godot throughout the play. They never stop saying “Let’s
go” and they never move. So inevitably an idea takes hold –
suicide! To hang themselves with their belts on the only
object available, a tree. They are saved, at least
momentarily, because they break their belts when wanting
to test how resistant they are. The final phrase, again and
always: “Let’s go”!” and they don’t move, as Beckett insists
in his stage directions.
“If one can enjoy the moment, writes Pierre Rey, one
holds the key to the world. One succeeds in putting oneself
into a timeless orbit, this point in space that Borges refers to
in The Aleph where suddenly present, past and future come
together to form but a single amalgam reduced to a strange
flickering of light seen in a certain place at a certain time of
day at a certain angle from a certain step of a staircase in a
- 78 -
certain district of a certain town.”
But nevertheless…
“Sometimes, further and further away, when the night is

truly beautiful, I hear a distant laugh. I again wonder. […]
On these nights, or rather these mornings because the fall
occurs at dawn, I walk along the canals with a resolute
step.” (Camus, The Fall)
There is no ethic save practising non-desire.
You understand why Lacan’s reaction to a suicide,

however brutal it may appear, also sheds rays of light:
“What would you like him to have done instead?”
- 79 -
I have spoken!
- 80 -

An Essay On Suicide - Loïck Roche

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The Laugh of the Mona Lisa

THE LAUGH OF THE MONA LISA

Loïck Roche, AMP (Harvard), is a graduate of ESSEC Business School, Paris;

“I will undertake the difficult task

“Death is a part of faith [prolonged silence]; you are

Louvain, 1972, Catholic University. As we are speaking

called their “understandability”, as Jean-Baptiste Pontalis

And here too, much is also inherent in suicide…

As Harold Searles wrote (The Effort to Drive the Other

“If we did not rely strongly on this certitude, that this

being a part of this entire community called humanity, each

“As an arrow to its target, and we never miss it, […] we

If we exercise our “understandability”, what we mean by

As suicide was no stranger to Lacan, rumours were

circulating: “It appears that there are many suicides at

Patients committed themselves. “And afterwards?” Lacan

say that they are going to commit suicide. Assertions that

“Life, wrote Cioran, is bearable only with the idea that

“Suicide, wrote Kant, is a free act.” “The ultimate

We can, when we wish to do so, depart from life by

Jean-Noël Cuénod, the Paris correspondent for the

Even though suicide is not condemned by the Church,

In the time of Plato, who was a believer, death was the

There are always those who constantly want to prevent

Another restriction on the freedom to commit suicide is

teenagers speak of their attempts): “Adolescents

“Certain people, explains Lawrence Stevens, believe

live a little longer, until the strong emotional reaction to a

[…] The usual justification given for forced internment,

[…] Another factor to be considered is that mental

have undergone psychiatric treatment compared to the

During his existence, and if he enjoys at least a part of

Here too, without being schizophrenic! “When working

Although the first certitude – the certitude of one’s death

“I was on the rails, and travelling. [Then] the locomotive

“Everyone, at least once, either seriously or “courteously

In the backpack of our torment, we all have suicidal

We are like the characters of Dostoyevsky, of Kurosawa.

speaking like that. Then he meets another friend, he has tea

“We other samurai, what are we?” It is this question

“The idea of suicide, wrote Nietzsche (Beyond good and

Suicide can affect everybody. Indeed, suicide impinges

“How many people wanted to commit suicide and were

Already in Roman antiquity, as can be found on the

Things are no better today. As Durkheim has already

”Thinking about suicide is an everyday thing” wrote

Listing like Prévert, perhaps excluding the racoon… the

1990 he covered his head; the window through which Gilles

“Even if the gods are plotting against us and the planets

Suicide is a right. For Nietzsche (Human, All too

the psychiatrist Thomas Szasz: “Suicide is a fundamental

The main thing – and this is not the most simple – is to

One must consider suicide when one cannot commit this

exclude here, and in what follows, the suicides which are

I think of Socrates, condemned by the Layman’s Court to

freedom for all his slaves. Other last words – those of

In Antiquity, as Wikipedia reports, “suicide was

of Philippi (in Macedonia) – a battle won by Octavius and

“In Roman society, as we continue to see in Wikipedia,

The phrase by Elsa Triolet could be applied here: “Every

To confirm that one is in the presence of a suicide, death

We will leave aside a number of cases. Assisted suicides,

Lawrence Stevens tells the story of Suzy Szasz, a victim