Abstract

In this paper, I problematize the suicides out of despair (hereafter sod) as statements of unfreedom. The paper is divided into six sections. The first section introduces the problem and situates it within the existing scholarship. The second section puts forward the first of the two arguments the paper engages: suicide as unfreedom. In this section, the situational and essent’ial ontology of suicide is briefly discussed. Then I proceed to classify two major forms of unfreedoms emergent from the historical ontology of human social life: slavery and bare life. The third section of the paper problematizes unfreedom as freedom corrupted both from the perspectives of Heideggerian essent’ial ontology and Badiouian situational ontology through set theoretical models of freedom/unfreedom. Subsequently, three sets of unfreedom- heteronomy, atomy and bare life and one set of freedom vis-à-vis autonomy is logically derived and discussed. Freedom is presented as a directive idea helpful in doing away with unfreedoms. Then the second of the two problems – unfreedom as suicidal- is briefly discussed. The concluding section draws that despite the emergent historical reality having framed human social life as unfree, we could still be hopeful in recovering freedom as the essent’ial ontology of the human species and the evental(événementiel) potential of the situational ontology of life is not fundamentally unfree.