The Postmodern Suicide, Part 1, by Adam Lehrer
In this essay originally published in 2021, Adam Lehrer analyzes the eerie similarities in mindsets of three men and thinkers who all killed themselves in the 21st Century...
On September 12, 2008, novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a two-page letter to his wife and arranged the manuscript for his posthumous unfinished novel THE PALE KING before hanging himself from a rafter of his house. He was 46.
On September 13, 2012, contemporary artist Mike Kelley killed himself through what appeared to be carbon monoxide poisoning, according to his autopsy’s reports. The circumstances, as with many a postmodern suicide, are strange, disconcerting, and begging of conspiratorial ruminations. Kelley was 57.
On January 13, 2017, cultural theorist Mark Fisher hanged himself shortly before the release of his last book The Weird and the Eerie after publicly discussing his extreme depression for some years before. His death marked the end of something, of which I’ll discuss later. Fisher was 48.
Artaud said that Van Gogh was “suicided by society. [1]” The phrase is one I consider often. Earlier this year, I wrote about the epistemology of “the blackpill”: what is it exactly, and what are we expressing when we say that we’ve taken it? My co-host on the System of Systems podcast, the Perpetual Self Optimizer, says that the only way to truly take the blackpill is to push nihilism to its logical conclusion and bite the bullet – that is, to kill yourself. There is no pill blacker than death itself. But if Van Gogh was suicided by society, what does it mean to be suicided by a society that doesn’t exist? “There is no society”, or so says the aphoristic ruling class mantra (Thatcher’s influence remains omnipotent). If Van Gogh was force fed his blackpill by a society at the dawn of modernism in rapid evolution, is it somehow worse to be force fed the blackpill now – by a society that doesn’t exist? The postmodern blackpill — the contemporary suicide — is given to us by the simulation of a society that isn’t real. A postmodern suicide is the only real action that can be taken in a society gone hyperreal. The postmodern suicide follows the logic of postmodernism itself, making the postmodern suicides its prophecies.