Abbt
Fakultäten » Philosophische Fakultät » Philosophisches Seminar » Allgemein » Prof. Dr. Georg Kohler (emeritiert) » Abbt
Completed research project
| Title / Titel | Speechless Between Life and Death. The Inexplicable Suicide as a Challenge for Ethics Discussed on the Basis of Literary Texts |
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| Abstract (PDF, 14 KB) | |||||
| Original title / Originaltitel | Wortverlassen zwischen Leben und Tod. Der grundlose Suizid als Herausforderung für die Ethik diskutiert an literarischen Texten |
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| Summary / Zusammenfassung | The language of literature is marked by attempts to question and break down learned discourse and to replace it with new ideas. The attempt at communicating reality via language leads literature to those areas of existence in which human awareness and personal experience are separated from language. Where language ends, where silence prevails, a specific literary potential appears and gives access to hidden innerliness and hard-to-access subjectivity. This potential of literature must be taken into consideration in the ethical debate on the right to suicide, specifically because the individual desire for death is often missing in the discussion, and wordlessly constitutes itself as an existential event. Literature as the expression of the silenced, as the rhetoric of speechlessness, as the communicator of the unsaid and the unsayable, becomes essential, because it is not tied to a discourse of reasons. Literature, therefore, also becomes the critical opposite of current ethical approaches, which make the legitimization of acts of suicide dependent on their capacity for justification. The chief aim of my dissertation is to exploit the specific potential of literary texts – in which the “speechless” desire for death or suicide is expressed and discussed – for the purposes of the ethical discussion of the right to one’s own, self-determined death. Using selected literary examples, I will examine the notions of autonomy and justifiability, which are put forward in the language of ethics as legitimizing criteria for suicide. My objective is to analyze the critical moment inherent in the desire for death and to question to what extent the ethical legitimacy of the desire for death cannot be tied to its justifiability. |
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| Keywords / Suchbegriffe | Ethics, suicide, death wish, speechlessness, aesthetics, literature, Ethik, Suizid, Todeswunsch, Sprachlosigkeit, Ästhetik, Literatur | ||||
| Project leadership and contacts / Projektleitung und Kontakte |
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| Funding source(s) / Unterstützt durch |
SNF (Personen- und Projektförderung), Foundation |
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| In collaboration with / In Zusammenarbeit mit |
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| Duration of Project / Projektdauer | Sep 2001 to Mar 2005 |