Suicide and the Coloniality of the Senses, Time, and Being: The Aesthetics of Death Desires

Marcela Polanco () and Anthony Pham ()
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Marcela Polanco: Department of Counseling & School Psychology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA
Anthony Pham: Department of Counseling & School Psychology, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA

Social Sciences, 2024, vol. 13, issue 11, 1-16

Abstract: We engage the decolonial option from Abya Yala, el Caribe, and Eastern Europe with an interest in suicide from our struggles as racialized people and our dehumanization, whereby, for many of us, suicide is not an act of autonomy or resistance but the reaffirmation of death as an ongoing state of living. This is the permanent reality of existence concocted by coloniality and its constitutive effect on lived experience. We depart from the assumption that suicide materializes according to someone’s thinking about the world and of a particular philosophy. Thus, predominantly, suicide is the universal name someone’s knowledge has given to an experience; and whose experience is named as such is consequently universally configured as a suicidal being. Here, we discuss suicide from understandings that come from non-discursive domains, and from a different genealogy than western Europe’s; the coloniality of the senses, time and being. We attempt to story what violence does in relation to an already violent circumstance, suicide, therapists and hotline workers, and undocumented lives in the U.S., when singularly imposing one way of the world. We are interested in adding visibility to the legacy of erasure and violence that the epistemologies and ontologies of suicide, suicide assessments, and therapists’ clinical judgements perpetuate; further sustaining dehumanization and the imposition of death as a constant in life. We discuss a crisis suicide call as the lay of the land of modernity’s suicide assessments, constructed as an assemblage from our shared memories on many stories we have heard in our work. We annotate it as it unfolds, reflecting upon our expected practices in institutionalized settings, under the control of modernity/coloniality that discriminates against pluriversal temporalities, sensings, and relationalities.

Keywords: suicide assessment; suicide; coloniality of being; coloniality of the senses; coloniality of time; family therapy; suicidal being; decoloniality; decolonization; death desires (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A B N P Y80 Z00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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