Abstract

With focus on Donne's Biathanatos, this essay examines relationships between self-killing, the public sphere, and personal freedom in the seventeenth century and in the present. Specifically, the essay explores how debates about the ethics of self-killing—and about whether publics are competent to decide those ethics—open onto debates about the kind of freedom that public life is thought to confer. Numerous scholars describe the histories of self-killing and of the early modern public sphere with emphasis on enabling, empowering escapes from authoritarian overdetermination. This essay, by contrast, argues that Biathanatos defends a freedom—both to debate suicide publicly and to decide about suicide privately—that is vexing, not enabling, and that induces a hobbling, yet salutary epistemological humility.

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