Antiphilosophy in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon: Is Black Suicide Possible?

The fundamental question

Ever since the etymons sui (self) and cidium (murder) were first conjoined in the early seventeenth century by the British physician Sir Thomas Browne, suicide has signified self-murder. As its etymology implies, "suicide" condenses together multiple subject positions into one: felon, judge, executioner, victim, witness, in short, a juridical being. Yet so protean are the cultural meanings of suicide, historically and geographically, that suicidology—the expert science of suicide causation and prevention—has struggled to establish an agreed upon definition of "suicide." Despite this struggle to formalize its meaning, suicide is almost always presumed to be a pathological and intensely individual act, an agon in which a human being is imagined in an act of claiming mastery over themselves against the unbearable exigencies of their worldly conditions. This deadly struggle for prestige inexorably gives rise to Sadean images of strangled, ruptured, and poisoned flesh as much as it occasions hagiographic inscriptions of anguish and relief. "Suicide" is thus the idiom of a limitless freedom from the vicissitudes of necessity and survival. Paradoxically, the contemporary search for the causes of suicide is an attempt to stop thinking about it.

As the leading question of suicidology, "What causes suicide?" proceeds as if the "reality" of suicide is a universally available and stable category of morbid experience. This suspension or deferral of thought should be understood as a repression of the conceptual genealogy of suicide, obviating the fundamental question, "What is suicide?" We might think of this repression as the "oblivion of suicide," a forgetting that elevates the enigma of suicide causation to the dignity of something universally true about the nature of the human species. In generating significations (indeed, rationalizations) about its enigmatic nature, the expert discourse of suicide fills the very hole its oblivion produces. For suicidology, the oblivion of suicide obfuscates the field's incomplete rupture from the Judeo-Christian call for the love of Life and Man. This call, however sublimated in the suicidological call for the prevention of suicide, is the affirmation qua election of a particular form of life.

Colonial anthropology long ago deemed Man as the "suicidal species," distinct from the animal order in his ability to contemplate their self-murder. This election of universal Man historically coincided with what the Black feminist theorist Sylvia Wynter would call the "dysselection" of blackness. I reckon that when we think of suicide, we think not Black. Punning on the secular and religious entanglement of "natural selection" and "divine election" of Man—Man "being isomorphic with the being of being human itself" (Wynter 310)—Wynter describes "dysselection" as the affirmation of an ontology that obliterates Black life, one that both inheres in and makes possible the affirmation of human life. Wynter notes that "while the West placed itself at the apex, incorporating the rest" into a commonwealth of hierarchically ordered humans, "the Negro" was constitutively "consigned to the pre-Darwinian last link in the Chain of Being—to the 'missing link' position […] between rational humans and irrational animals" (301). By dint this dysselection that began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, blackness figures as the bottom rung upon which racial difference pivots, with blackness representing "symbolic death [and] the 'name of what is evil'" (308). Dysselection comprises the inverse of an ontological affirmation of the world that makes ethical relations within the world possible. Once posed ontologically, "What is suicide?" therefore becomes the fundamental question of Being. To remember the history of Being, writes Black philosopher Calvin Warren, "one must also remember the Negro" (7), fixed nondialectically between Man and animal.

If this process of dysselection structures suicide as a problem of freedom—about what compels Man to act—then suicide is a problem that represses the question of the essence of human freedom, a question whose immanent verso is "the Negro Question" (Warren 7). What this problem ultimately refers to is the horizon of natality that conditions the ground that unfolds between womb and tomb, a natal spacing that is constituted by the very beings it constitutes. This natal spacing is not only the...