Artigo - Stoic Defense of Physician-Assisted Suicide

Thomas F.
Tierney
Suicidal thoughts
Hobbes, Foucault and the right to die
Abstract Liberal articulations of the right to die generally focus on

balancing individual rights against state interests, but this approach does
not take full advantage of the disruptive potential of this contested right.
This article develops an alternative to the liberal approach to the right to
die by engaging the seemingly discordant philosophical perspectives of
Michel Foucault and Thomas Hobbes. Despite Foucault’s objections, a
rapprochement between these perspectives is established by focusing on
their shared emphasis on the role that death plays in the order of modernity.
After the article has established the complementarity of Foucault and
Hobbes, Hobbes’ unique stance toward suicide is first viewed in the context
of the early-modern hostility toward suicide, and then contrasted with
Foucault’s Stoic-inspired affirmation of suicide. This comparison of these
two philosophers’ positions on suicide opens to contestation dimensions of
modern subjects that remain undisturbed by liberal approaches to the right
to die.
Key words bio-power · Michel Foucault · governmentality · Thomas
Hobbes · liberalism · right to die · self-preservation · Seneca · Stoicism ·
suicide
[N]ecessity of nature maketh men to will and desire bonum sibi, that which
is good for themselves, and to avoid that which is hurtful; but most of all,
the terrible enemy of nature, death, from whom we expect both the loss of
all power, and also the greatest of bodily pains in the losing; it is not against
reason, that a man doth all he can to preserve his own body and limbs
both from death and pain. (Hobbes, 1640[1839]: 83)
[I]f you take proper care of yourself, that is, if you know ontologically what
you are, if you know what you are capable of . . . if you know what things
you should and should not fear, if you know what you can reasonably hope
for and on the other hand what things should not matter to you, if you
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 32 no 5 • pp. 601–638

PSC
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453706064899
602
Philosophy & Social Criticism 32 (5)
know, finally, that you should not be afraid of death – if you know all this,
you cannot abuse your power over others. Thus there is no danger.
(Foucault, 1984[1997a]: 288)
Of the many bio-ethical dilemmas that have appeared on the moral

horizon of medically advanced cultures over the last three decades, one
of the most visible and divisive issues is the recently asserted ‘right to
die’.1 This right usually appears in public discourse in the form of
physician-assisted suicide (PAS) and/or the related practice of euthan-
asia, but also includes the less controversial right to refuse life-saving
treatment. While the right to refuse medically necessary treatment has
been widely accepted for decades, the right to hasten one’s death with
the help of a physician, either through assisted suicide or euthanasia,
was contested in the legislative and judicial forums of many nations
during the last decade of the 20th century. Australia, Canada, Columbia,
England, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, the Philippines,
South Africa, Sweden and the United States all dealt with attempts to
legalize PAS and/or euthanasia during the 1990s. Although none of these
nations legalized either form of life-terminating act, the Northern Terri-
tory of Australia authorized both PAS and euthanasia in 1996, but the
Australian Senate quickly overturned the policy in 1997.2 In the United
States, the citizens of Oregon legalized PAS in 1994 through the ballot
initiative known as the Death with Dignity Act, and in 1996 defeated
a repeal measure; the law went into effect in 1997, making Oregon the
only American state in which assisted suicide is legal. Holland has, of
course, been the center of attention in discussions of PAS and euthan-
asia. Since 1973 the Dutch allowed, and gradually formalized, an excep-
tion to the national prohibitions against killing and assisted suicide, and
in 2001 the Netherlands became the first nation to legalize both PAS
and euthanasia when it passed the Termination of Life on Request and
Assisted Suicide (Review Procedures) Act.3 The next year Belgium
followed the Dutch example, in part, and legalized euthanasia but not
PAS (Watson, 2001: 1024). Recently, Switzerland has become Europe’s
center for ‘suicide tourism’ due to a unique provision of its 1942 law
against assisted suicide, which allows anyone to assist in a suicide for
altruistic reasons (Hurst and Mauron, 2003: 271–3). Clearly, the right
to die will continue to be a hotly contested topic of public discourse in
the near future.
Since the right to die usually appears in a juridical context in liberal
democratic cultures, involving legislatures and/or courts, the issue is
normally addressed as a question of balancing the right of individuals
to end their lives in a manner of their own choosing, against the state’s
interest in preserving life. For instance, in 1997 the US Supreme Court
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Tierney: Suicidal thoughts: Hobbes and Foucault
heard two cases in which state prohibitions against assisted suicide were
challenged by a group of physicians and terminally ill patients.4 Six
prominent liberal philosophers whom Michael Sandel dubbed the
‘Dream Team’ (Sandel, 1997: 27) – Ronald Dworkin, Thomas Nagel,
Robert Nozick, John Rawls, Thomas Scanlon and Judith Jarvis
Thompson – filed an amicus curaie brief in these cases, and also
published their ‘Philosophers’ Brief’ in The New York Review of Books.
The Dream Team predictably argued that ‘[a] person’s interest in follow-
ing his own convictions at the end of life is so central a part of the more
general right to make “intimate and personal choices” for himself that
a failure to protect that particular interest [from state interference]
would undermine the general right altogether’ (Dworkin et al., 1997:
44). The court ultimately rejected that argument, however, and unani-
mously upheld the state prohibitions of assisted suicide. In the majority
opinion Chief Justice Rehnquist emphasized that states have an
‘“unqualified interest in the preservation of human life,” . . . even for
those who are near death’ (521 U.S. 728, 730). This balancing act
between the rights of individuals and the interests of the state may
indeed be required by the liberal juridical paradigm, but it misses the
opportunity this bio-ethical issue presents both for revealing the way in
which medical power and legal power are bound together in a particu-
lar relationship to death in modernity, and for fostering reconsideration
of the role that this juridico-medical power plays in shaping and
ordering the identities of modern individuals.
In order to cultivate some of the disruptive and hopeful possibili-
ties that the newly asserted right to die presents within this particular
configuration of power, I will offer an alternative perspective to liberal-
ism that focuses not on the question of whether this contested right
should be sanctioned by the law, but rather on the changing nature of
the subject that can assert such a right. In developing this genealogical
approach I will, unsurprisingly, rely to a great degree on Michel
Foucault’s perspective on the unique nature of modern forms of power.
In the first section of this article I will examine the conception of power
that Foucault articulated in his publications, course lectures and inter-
views from the second half of the 1970s, and link this work with his
earlier analysis of the birth of modern medicine. My primary aim in this
section will be to emphasize how a crucial inversion in the status of
death occurred both in the exercise of power and the development of
medicine in modernity. After discussing the role that death plays in
Foucault’s analysis of modernity I will turn, perhaps more surprisingly,
to the political theory of Thomas Hobbes, and argue that not only is
Leviathan compatible with Foucault’s perspective on the nature of
modern power, but the combination of these two perspectives reveals
crucial facets of the modern subject that are implicated in the assertion
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of the right to die. This combination may be surprising because, as Paul
Rabinow recently remarked, ‘Foucault never seriously entertained a
view of the individual as bearer of natural rights’ (Rabinow, 1997:
xv–xvi), and in particular, he was explicitly and emphatically dismissive
of Hobbes’ natural rights theory. Therefore, before I can engage their
perspectives I will have to answer Foucault’s objections to taking
Hobbes’ political theory seriously. After establishing this rapprochement
between these early- and late-modern thinkers, I will examine Hobbes’
prescient position on suicide in the context of the 17th-century suicide
debate, and then contrast Hobbes’ stance toward suicide with Foucault’s
admittedly extreme position. From the Hobbesian/Foucauldian perspec-
tive developed here, the right to die should no longer appear simply as
a matter of balance between the individual and the state, but should
instead raise unsettling questions about the very nature of modern
subjects.
Death, medicine and bio-power
In the mid-1970s Foucault underwent something of a crisis regarding

his earlier publications. Looking back on this body of work, he
announced in his 1975–6 course at the Collège de France that his
previous investigations ‘never added up to a coherent body of work’,
and were ‘fragments of research, none of which was completed, and
none of which was followed through’ (2003: 3; and 1980c: 78). His
dissatisfaction with the earlier work turned on his recognition of the
inadequacy of the implicit conception of power that informed his
important analyses of those disciplines that rendered human being into
an object of knowledge. In this earlier work he primarily treated power
as a repressive force that excluded, silenced and marginalized that which
did not fit within the order that was established through its exercise. To
move beyond this limited understanding of power, Foucault at first
adopted a Nietzschean stance that saw power relations as a struggle
among competing forces, and relied heavily on militaristic images of
war. In Discipline and Punish (1975[1979]), for instance, Foucault
argued that disciplinary techniques do not simply repress criminality,
but rather produce dangerous individuals, such as the delinquent, and
concluded the book with the following image: ‘In this central and
centralized humanity, the effect and instrument of complex power
relations, bodies and forces subjected by multiple mechanisms of “incar-
ceration”, objects for discourses that are in themselves elements for this
strategy, we must hear the distant roar of battle’ (1979: 308).
Foucault had already begun to reconsider this Nietzschean concep-
tion of power by the time Discipline and Punish was published, however,
605
and in his courses from 1975 through 1979 he struggled to develop a
conception of power adequate to the task of understanding the ways in
which lives have been ordered in modernity.5 As he remarked in his
1975–6 course:
It is obvious that everything I have said to you in previous years is inscribed
within the struggle-repression schema. . . . Now, as I tried to apply it, I was
eventually forced to reconsider it; both because, in many respects, it is still
insufficiently elaborated – I would even go so far as to say that it is not
elaborated at all – and also because I think that the twin notions of ‘repres-
sion’ and ‘war’ have to be considerably modified and ultimately, perhaps,
abandoned. (2003: 17; and 1980c: 92)
With the introduction of the concept of bio-power in the first volume
of The History of Sexuality (1976[1980a]), Foucault clearly moved
beyond the repressive and militaristic conceptions of power. By bio-
power he was referring to a positive, productive form of power that
does not so much restrict or limit dangerous activity, as promote or
facilitate socially valuable behavior. This positive form of power does
not operate primarily through laws or interdictions issued by sovereign
authority, but works instead through the dissemination of standards and
norms derived from the study of populations by the ‘human sciences’
and other surveillance techniques.
In describing the historical emergence of bio-power Foucault focused
on the relation between death and power, and presented it as the culmi-
nation of a gradual reversal of the traditional form of power that had
been exercised by medieval sovereigns. ‘For a long time,’ claimed
Foucault, ‘one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was the
right to decide life and death’ (1980a: 135). But in that period between
the Renaissance and the 19th century, which he called the ‘Classical Age’,
the sovereign’s seemingly absolute right to kill subjects took a ‘consider-
ably diminished form’ as liberal political theory established limits on the
exercise of sovereign power. Death could be inflicted directly on subjects
only as a punishment for injuries or threats to the sovereign, and could
be inflicted indirectly when the sovereign compelled subjects to risk their
lives in his defense. Since the classical age, however, a ‘very profound
transformation of these mechanisms of power’ has occurred:
This death that was based on the right of the sovereign is now manifested
as simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or
develop its life. . . . But this formidable power of death . . . now presents
itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life,
that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to
precise controls and comprehensive regulations. (1980a: 136–7)
With the emergence of this positive, non-repressive form of power, death
could be directly or indirectly inflicted by the state only to the extent
606
that it promoted the life and interests of the social body, rather than
those of the sovereign or state. Power was no longer manifested
primarily through the sporadic, ceremonial imposition of death, but was
instead exercised in a more constant manner through the shaping of the
minds and bodies of individuals by the acquisition and dissemination
of knowledge in disciplines like psychology, sociology, criminology,
psychiatry and, especially, medicine.
Although Foucault’s only sustained treatment of medicine was
published very early in his career, in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archae-
ology of Medical Perception (1963[1973a]), he was nevertheless keenly
aware of the role that medicine played in the network of power relations
that he uncovered in the late 1970s. As he put it in a 1976 interview:
Medical power is at the heart of the society of normalization. Its effects
can be seen everywhere: in the family, in schools, in factories, in courts of
law, on the subject of sexuality, education, work, crime. Medicine has taken
on a general social function: it infiltrates law, it plugs into it, it makes it
work. A sort of juridico-medical complex is presently being constituted,
which is the major form of power. (1996b: 197)
And while The Birth of the Clinic has been accurately characterized as
the ‘most neglected of Foucault’s works’ (Jones and Porter, 1994: 31,
also 12; and Armstrong, 1997: 19–20),6 this early examination of
medicine fits quite well with his later claims about bio-power. For just
as bio-power emerged out of a transformation in the relationship
between power and death, Foucault revealed in The Birth of the Clinic
that the normalizing power of modern medicine also developed out of
a fundamental reorientation in the relationship between medical knowl-
edge and death.
Prior to the 19th century, Foucault claimed, the ‘knowledge of life
was based on the essence of living’ and ‘an immemorial slope as old as
men’s fear turned the eyes of doctors towards the elimination of disease,
towards cure, towards life’ (1973a: 145–6). Around the turn of the
century, however, the ‘great break in the history of Western medicine’
occurred as physicians directed their gaze at that ‘great dark threat in
which [the doctor’s] knowledge and skill were abolished’ – death
(1973a: 146). Foucault attributed the birth of this ‘anatomico-clinical
gaze’ to Marie-François-Xavier Bichat, who posed the following chal-
lenge to his fellow physicians:
. . . for twenty years, from morning to night, you have taken notes at
patients’ bedsides on affections of the heart, the lungs, and the gastric
viscera, and all is confusion for you in the symptoms which, refusing to
yield up their meaning, offer you a succession of incoherent phenomena.
Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that obser-
vation alone could not dissipate. (quoted in Foucault, 1973a: 146)
607
Dissections had, of course, been carried out in splendid fashion during
the Renaissance, as celebrated anatomists like Vesalius and Fallopius
performed in lavish public anatomy theaters, revealing features of
human anatomy that had been obscured by the lasting influence of
classical Galenic medical theory. But what Bichat was proposing at the
turn of the 19th century was something altogether different than a struc-
tural anatomy that mapped the venal, nervous, muscular, skeletal and
organ systems; rather, he called for a pathological anatomy that traced
the course of disease throughout the dead body.
Bichat himself contributed to structural anatomy by breaking these
various systems and organs down into even more basic components,
and identifying 21 different tissues that constitute the structure of the
body, providing ‘the concrete forms of its unity’ (Foucault, 1973a: 128).
But Bichat’s primary interest was in studying how disease affected these
constitutive tissues and spread throughout the body by way of them. In
following the course of disease throughout the body, Bichat also
discovered that death itself was not an event that occurred at a single
point in time, but instead ‘has a teeming presence that analysis may
divide into time and space’. Pathological anatomy revealed that death,
or the process of mortification, begins well before the complete death
of the organism, and ‘long after the death of the individual, minuscule,
partial deaths continue to dissociate the islets of life that still subsist’
(Foucault, 1973a: 142). This novel conception of death as something
temporally and spatially divisible initially caused serious epistemologi-
cal problems for medicine, due to the confusion it introduced between
the spatio-temporal course of disease, on the one hand, and that of
death, on the other. ‘If the traces of the disease happened to bite into
the corpse,’ Foucault explained, ‘then no evidence could distinguish
absolutely between what belonged to it and what to death; their signs
intersected in indecipherable disorder’ (Foucault, 1973a: 141).
Bichat responded to this epistemological problem by subjecting the
process of death to an even more focused gaze in his Recherches phys-
iologiques sur la vie et la mort (1800), which was ‘the first large scale
experimental, physiological examination of death’ (Ackerknecht, 1968:
21–2). In this work he not only distinguished ‘organic’ and ‘animal’ life
(i.e. vegetative and conscious life, respectively), and noted that the
former could continue after the expiration of the latter, but he also
identified three different sites from which death could begin: the heart,
brain, and lungs (Ackerknecht, 1968: 21–3). With this anatomical
illumination of the mortification process, death was no longer some-
thing beyond life and medicine – the great dark Other – but was instead
‘turned for the first time into a technical instrument that provides a
grasp on the truth of life and the nature of its illness. Death [became]
the great analyst that shows the connexions by unfolding them, and
608
bursts open the wonders of genesis in the rigour of decomposition: and’,
Foucault insisted, ‘the word decomposition must be allowed to stagger
under the weight of its meaning’ (Foucault, 1973a: 144). Once death
was dissected, the nature of disease also underwent a significant trans-
formation. Like death, disease had been seen as something exterior and
threatening to life, and for centuries had been linked to a ‘metaphysic
of evil’ (Foucault, 1973a: 196). After the pathological-anatomical gaze
was directed through the corpse, however, disease was no longer
approached as the negation of health, but instead became a positively
known phenomenon. ‘[S]een in relation to death,’ Foucault noted,
‘disease becomes exhaustively legible, open without remainder to the
sovereign dissection of language and of the gaze’ (1973a: 196).
Foucault’s account of the origins of modern medicine stands in stark
contrast to those in the medical community and elsewhere who today
respond to the assertion of the right to die by claiming that medicine is
concerned solely with the preservation of life, and cannot possibly
embrace death. On the contrary, Foucault emphasized that modern
medicine, unlike its predecessors, was grounded precisely in a positive
relation to death:
It will no doubt remain a decisive fact about our culture, that its first scien-
tific discourse concerning the individual had to pass through this stage of
death. Western man could constitute himself in his own eyes as an object
of science, he grasped himself within his language, and gave himself, in
himself and by himself, a discursive existence, only in the opening created
by his own elimination. (1973a: 197; also 144)
And beyond grounding the medical gaze, Foucault also recognized that
the anatomical illumination of death provided an epistemological model
for all those sciences that objectify ‘man’. As he put it,
. . . positive medicine marked, at the empirical level, the beginning of that
fundamental relation that binds modern man to his original finitude.
Hence, the fundamental place of medicine in the overall architecture of the
human sciences. . . . This is because medicine offers modern man the obsti-
nate, yet reassuring face of his finitude; in it, death is endlessly repeated,
but it is also exorcized; and although it ceaselessly reminds man of the limit
that he bears within him, it also speaks to him of that technical world that
is the armed, positive, full form of his finitude. (1973a: 197–8)
So as sovereign power turned away from the threat of death and the
scaffold in the early-modern period and gave way to a positive form of
power that administered life, medicine assumed a crucial role in the
exercise of this new form of power by turning toward death to establish
a foundation for the human sciences that underlie bio-power.7 However,
what seems to be missing from Foucault’s account of this shifting
relationship between power, medicine and death is some indication of
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the individual’s subjective experience of death. But it would certainly be
a mistake to limit what he has to say about death in The Birth of the
Clinic to an archaeological treatment of discursive practices. Beyond the
objectification of human being, Foucault was also acutely, if elliptically,
aware of the role that the anatomical understanding of death played in
the constitution of the self-consciousness of modern individuals. In fact,
he offered in this early text a description of the modern relation between
death and self-consciousness that sounded very much like Heidegger’s
description of an authentic, existential experience of death in Being
and Time: ‘It is in that perception of death that the individual finds
himself, escaping from a monotonous, average life; in the slow, half-
subterranean, but already visible approach of death, the dull, common
life becomes an individuality at last; a black border isolates it and gives
it the style of its own truth’ (1973a: 171; emphasis added; cf. Heidegger,
1962: 299–311).
Although Foucault did not explore the subjective dimensions of this
black border in The Birth of the Clinic, he did mention certain paths
that he would investigate more fully later in his career. For instance, he
linked death with eroticism and noted the contemporaneity of Bichat
and Sade, and also mentioned in passing several artistic and literary
manifestations of that 19th-century voice that spoke ‘obstinately of
death’ (1973a: 171).8 Without developing any of these themes, Foucault
intimated that the opening of the discursive space of the corpse power-
fully influenced the subjectivization, as well as the objectification, of
human subjects. Indeed, he concluded The Birth of the Clinic by
proclaiming that ‘[g]enerally speaking, the experience of individuality
in modern culture is bound up with that of death’ (1973a: 197). Along
with these important changes in medicine and sovereignty that Foucault
identified as occurring around the turn of the 19th century, there was
also an earlier preparatory transformation in the modern subject’s
stance toward death, but this occurred in a realm that Foucault was
reluctant to consider either early or late in his career – the domain of
classical liberal political theory.
Foucault’s dismissal of Hobbes
One might expect that early-modern political theory would play an

important role in Foucault’s account of the emergence of bio-power,
since liberalism helped limit the scope of the sovereign’s power by
shifting the foundation of power from the monarch to the subjects.
However, liberalism never questioned the essential principle of the
‘juridical-political code’ of the king, which held ‘that power always had
to be exercised in the form of law’ (1980a: 86, 88). Furthermore, by
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focusing primarily on the juridical relation between individual bearers
of rights, on the one hand, and the state, on the other, liberalism masked
the ways in which the subject was shaped and incited to act through the
wide variety of non-legal disciplines, institutions and techniques that
constitute bio-power. Consequently, Foucault generally ignored the
dominant figures of 17th-century liberalism, but he was emphatically
dismissive of Hobbes. In fact, in his discussion of the classical sover-
eign’s mitigated power of life and death in The History of Sexuality,
Foucault asked, ‘Must we follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to
the prince of the natural right possessed by every individual to defend
his life even if this meant the death of others?’ (1980a: 135). And he
answered that question in the résumé of the course he offered at the
Collège de France in the winter of the same year, 1975–6: ‘We must
begin by ruling out certain false paternities. Especially Hobbes’ (2003:
270; for alternative translations, see 1997c: 63; and 1980d: 18).
Although Foucault never offered any sustained criticism of Hobbes,
some insight into his difficulty with him is provided by the published
class lectures and résumés from the mid- to late 1970s, when Foucault
was trying to articulate a conception of power that went beyond both
the traditional terms of the juridical subject, as well as the Nietzschean
alternative that he had embraced.9 In his attempt to develop a concep-
tion of power adequate to modernity, Foucault was most bothered not
by Hobbes’ classic articulation of the juridical, rights-bearing subject,
as one might expect; rather, it was his claims about the warlike state of
nature that led Foucault to declare Hobbes a false paternity. In his
1975–6 course Foucault was tracing the lineage of the militaristic
conception of power through figures like Lilburne, Coke, Boulainvilliers
and Du Buat-Nancay, all of whom evoked passionate memories of
specific historical conflicts and sought to rejoin those ancient struggles
as the foundation of their political thought (2003: 267–2). On
Foucault’s reading, Hobbes was an adversary of such ‘political histori-
cism’ in general, and of the use to which the Norman Conquest was
being put by other 17th-century English theorists, in particular (2003:
98, 110–11). It was in this context that Foucault declared:
What Hobbes calls the war of every man against every man is no sense a
real historical war, but a play of presentations that allows every man to
evaluate the threat that every man represents to him, to evaluate the
willingness of others to fight, and to assess the risk that he himself would
run if he resorted to force. Sovereignty . . . is established not by the fact of
warlike domination but, on the contrary, by a calculation that makes it
possible to avoid war. For Hobbes, it is nonwar that founds the State and
gives it its form. (2003: 270, also 92; cf. 1997c: 63; and 1980d: 18)
Foucault was certainly correct in excluding Hobbes from the line of
thought he was examining in this course; for Hobbes, the first law of
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nature was ‘to seek Peace, and follow it’ (Hobbes, 1962: 104). However,
two years later, in 1978, Foucault once again took up Hobbes in the
well-known lecture ‘Governmentality’. Here the context was not an
investigation of the origins of the militaristic conception of power, but
rather an examination of the larger historical shift from sovereignty to
governmentality. Although this is the same context as the conclusion of
the first volume of The History of Sexuality, where Foucault first
dismissed Hobbes, in this instance he was somewhat more generous and
nuanced in his explanation of Hobbes’ limited relevance for understand-
ing governmentality:
This art of government tried, so to speak, to reconcile itself with the theory
of sovereignty by attempting to derive the ruling principles of an art of
government from a renewed version of the theory of sovereignty – and this
is where those seventeenth-century jurists come into the picture who formal-
ize or ritualize the theory of the contract. . . . But although contract theory,
with its reflection on the relationship between ruler and subjects, played a
very important role in theories of public law, in practice, as is evidenced by
the case of Hobbes (even though what Hobbes was aiming to discover was
the ruling principles of an art of government), it remained at the stage of
the formulation of general principles of public law. (1991: 98)
From Foucault’s perspective, therefore, Hobbes was at best a classical

theorist of sovereignty who was on the way toward governmentality,
and was at worst an opponent of the warlike conception of power that
was developed by other early-modern theorists. In either context,
Foucault found Hobbes to be of little value and discouraged any serious
consideration of his role in laying the foundation of modern forms of
power. However, I think Foucault overlooked certain dimensions of
Hobbes’ thought that not only illuminate the relation between death
and power in modernity, but also complement Foucault’s own analysis
of this relationship in interesting ways. For one of the insights provided
by Foucault’s reconceptualization of power was that ‘rather than asking
ideal subjects what part of themselves or their powers they have surren-
dered in order to let themselves become subjects, we have to look at
how relations of subjugation can manufacture subjects’ (2003: 265; cf.
1997c: 59; and 1980d: 15). Even though Foucault explicitly emphasized
that this process of subjugation would be ‘precisely the opposite of what
Hobbes was trying to do in Leviathan’ (2003: 28; cf. 1980c: 97–8), my
admittedly presumptuous claim is that Hobbes is most illuminating
precisely in regard to this manufacturing of subjects. Indeed, I will argue
that the Hobbesian subject is perfectly suited, if not a prerequisite, for
the exercise of bio-power in a system of governmentality. In order to
reveal Hobbes’ crucial contribution to the juridico-medical complex of
modernity we must look rather closely at Leviathan (1651), but our
primary concern is not ‘to discover how a multiplicity of individuals
612
and wills can be shaped into a single will or even a single body that is
supposedly animated by a soul known as sovereignty’, which is what
Foucault found to be the import of Leviathan (2003: 29; cf. 1980c:
97–8). Rather, our concern is to trace in Hobbes’ political thought the
inscription of such rights in the ‘multiple peripheral bodies, the bodies
that are constituted as subjects by power-effects’ (2003: 29; cf. 1980c:
98). In other words, we will follow Foucault’s advice to cut off the head
of the king more closely than he himself did (1980b: 121), and read
Leviathan in terms of subjects rather than sovereigns.
Bio-power and the Hobbesian subject
In Hobbes’ well-known state of nature, individuals were constantly at

risk of losing their lives in a violent confrontation due to two funda-
mental features of the Hobbesian subject – its natural right to do
whatever it thought would promote its life (1962: 103), and the rough
mental and physical equality that existed among subjects in this state of
nature (1962: 98–9).10 Because of their natural parity, no individual in
this state had such an advantage that it could hope to intimidate another
into forfeiting its natural right to anything it desired. Consequently,
when individuals in this state came to desire a common object they
became competitors, and this natural competition was intensified by the
passions, primarily vanity,11 and turned into a life-and-death struggle.
It is because of the interplay of these features of the subject – its natural
right and equality, as well as its vanity – that Hobbes concluded the
state of nature was a state of war, ‘every man, against every man’ (1962:
101; also 100, 103). What I would like to stress about Hobbes’ state of
nature, however, is not simply its constant threat of violence, but rather
the fact that this violence very poignantly raised the issue of human
mortality, and that it did so in a temporal context. One of the problems
or ‘incommodities’ of the state of nature, to use Hobbes’ term, was that
the lives of people in that state tended to be of short duration. In his
famous description of life in this state, Hobbes said it is ‘solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short’ (1962: 100; emphasis added), and at another
point in the text he said that in the state of natural equality ‘there can
be no security to any man, how strong or wise soever he be, of living
out the time, which nature ordinarily alloweth men to live’ (1962: 103).
So in Hobbes’ state of nature people not only died violently, but prema-
turely as well.
While I agree with Foucault’s observation that the founding of the
Hobbesian state was actually a choice to avoid war, I think he passed
a little too quickly over Hobbes’ account of the transition from the state
of nature to civil society. For Hobbes claimed that the possibility of
613
leaving the natural state of war was grounded ‘partly in the [subject’s]
passions, partly in his reason’ (1962: 102), and like the state of nature,
these passions and reason were imbued with a sense of mortality. Reason
helped lead out of the state of nature by revealing to the subject natural
laws which acted as limitations on the exercise of the natural right to
do and take whatever one wanted. In his discussion of the laws of
nature, Hobbes offered a generic definition of such laws which was
surprisingly specific:
A LAW OF NATURE, lex naturalis, is a precept or general rule, found out
by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that, which is destructive of
his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that,
by which he thinketh it may be best preserved. (1962: 103)
In general, therefore, a law of nature was not just an obligation or limi-
tation that humans naturally recognize; it was rather a limitation on the
fundamental right to do what one thought would best preserve one’s
life. According to the very idea of natural law one could not reasonably
exercise this right in a manner that would actually lead to one’s death,
and furthermore one must do, or as Hobbes put it, one was forbidden
to omit doing, that which one thought would best preserve or prolong
one’s life.
In comparison with its Stoic predecessor, Hobbes’ conception of the
natural law of self-preservation was uniquely modern. For Hobbes, the
primary objective of this law of nature was to preserve physical,
corporeal existence, while the Stoics were concerned with preserving
something other than the body. This distinction becomes clear when one
compares Hobbes’ corporeal conception of self-preservation with
Cicero’s description of the Stoic doctrine of self-love:
[S]ince love of self is implanted by nature in all men, both the foolish and
the wise alike will choose what is in accordance with nature and reject the
contrary. . . . When a man’s circumstances contain a preponderance of
things in accordance with nature, it is appropriate for him to remain alive;
when he possesses or sees in prospect a majority of the contrary things, it
is appropriate for him to depart from life. . . . And very often it is appro-
priate for the Wise Man to abandon life at a moment when he is enjoying
supreme happiness, if an opportunity offers for making a timely exit. For
the Stoic view is that happiness, which means life in harmony with nature,
is a matter of seizing the right moment. So that Wisdom her very self upon
occasion bids the Wise Man to leave her. (1967: III, 60–1, 279–81)
For the Stoics, the law of self-preservation or self-love did not preclude
the possibility of sacrificing one’s life in order to preserve one’s virtue
or tranquility, but as we will see, for Hobbes there was never a good
reason to abandon one’s life. (I will discuss this Stoic willingness to
choose death over life in more detail later in this article.)
614
Given Hobbes’ corporeal conception of the law of nature, Foucault
appears correct in describing Hobbesian subjects as calculative beings
who were rationally inclined to avoid war, and not the aggressive, belli-
cose individuals so often ascribed to Hobbes. However, the depiction of
the potential for violence in nature indicates that there was certainly
much more to the Hobbesian subject than reason alone. Some passions,
such as vanity, could cause individuals to ignore the dictates of reason
and put their lives at risk, but there were certain other passions that
could come to the aid of reason at such dangerous moments, and help
promote peace. Foremost among these peace-keeping passions was the
fear of violent death (1962: 100).12 For once the Hobbesian subject
engaged in and survived the life-and-death struggle that erupted out of
material competition, it became terrifyingly aware of the implications
of such struggles. Leo Strauss’ gloss on the fear of death in Hobbes’
theory is instructive here: ‘The struggle for pre-eminence, about
“trifles”, has become a life-and-death struggle. In this way natural man
happens unforeseen upon the danger of death; in this way he comes to
know this primary and greatest and supreme evil in the moment of being
irresistibly driven to fall back before death in order to struggle for his
life’ (1952: 20–1).13 This face-to-face confrontation with the possibility
of a violent death was, according to Strauss, ‘the passion which brings
man to reason’ (1952: 18).
Strauss’ emphasis on the terrifying fear of a violent death is appro-
priate for explaining the transition from the state of nature into civil
society, but I want to emphasize that the more moderate and persistent
fear of a premature death was crucial in supporting ‘the foresight of
their own preservation’ that Hobbes identified as ‘[t]he final cause, end,
or design of men . . . in the introduction of that restraint upon them-
selves, in which we see them live in commonwealths’ (1962: 129). For
after civil society succeeded, however imperfectly, in eliminating the
threat of violence from the lives of certain populations, it was the fear
of a premature death that rendered individuals responsive to the many
shifting strategies of self-preservation that were, and continue to be,
developed and deployed in the juridico-medical order of modernity.
Indeed, from my perspective the most notable feature of Hobbes’ politi-
cal theory is not the tension Strauss identified between base vanity and
the justified fear of a violent death (1952: 18), but rather the dynamic
relationship between the rational pursuit of self-preservation and the
more mundane, tepid fear of a premature death. For such Hobbesian
subjects could be counted upon to take whatever steps were required to
defer death and prolong their lives, and were precisely the sort of indi-
viduals who were fit for the exercise of bio-power. As modern medicine
produced new knowledge and techniques for maintaining and preserv-
ing life, these subjects could be counted onto quickly, and without any
615
coercion, alter their behavior and habits according to these new
standards.
Hobbes himself lived his life largely in accordance with this objec-
tive of deferring death as long as possible. Aside from his notorious
flight to France during the Civil Wars, which could be justified by the
fear of a violent death, Hobbes also governed himself on a daily basis
according to the fear of a premature death, and took the preservation
of his health as a serious personal responsibility. His health had been
poor until he reached the age of 40, but at that point he began follow-
ing a strict regimen, and enjoyed generally good health for the next five
decades of his long life (Aubrey, 1898: I, 347). Hobbes’ regimen was
based on the idea, quite common in the 17th century, that as people age
they come to have too much moisture and not enough heat, and conse-
quently his regimen consisted primarily of vigorous exercise that
produced a ‘great sweat’. According to one first-hand account, Hobbes’
‘profess’d Rule of Health was to dedicate the Morning to his Health,
and the Afternoon to his Studies. And therefore, at his first rising he
walk’d out and climb’d any Hill within his reach; or if the Weather was
not dry, he fatigued himself within doors, by some Exercise or other to
be in a Sweat’ (quoted in Rogow, 1986: 226). And John Aubrey, a
lifelong admirer who dedicated far more space to Hobbes’ life than any
other of his Brief Lives, noted that ‘[b]esides his dayly walking,
[Hobbes] did twice or thrice a yeare play at tennis (at about 75 he did
it)’. After such exercise, Hobbes’ routine was to ‘then give the servant
some money to rubbe him’. According to Aubrey, the reason Hobbes
regularly engaged in sweaty exercise and rubdowns was because these
‘he did believe would make him live two or three yeares the longer’
(1898: I, 351). And he not only vigorously exercised to extend his life,
but also sang in this manner for the same reason:
He had alwayes bookes of prick-song lyeing on his table . . . which at night,
when he was abed, and the dores made fast, and was sure nobody heard
him, he sang aloud (not that he had a very good voice) but for his health’s
sake: he did beleeve it did his lunges good, and conduced much to prolong
his life. (Aubrey, 1898: I, 352)
Hobbes’ personal behavior in regard to his health, as well as his

theoretical portrayal of a rational subject that is governed by the fear of
death, may appear unexceptional today. After all, one of the distinctive
features of modern culture is the tremendous extension of human life
expectancy that has been accomplished largely through the development
of medical knowledge and techniques. Reasonable individuals have been
eager participants in this modern project of death deferral, and remain
exceedingly concerned about their health and quite willing to spend time
and money to follow the latest regimental advice disseminated by
616
medical and fitness authorities. Indeed, in regard to the prevailing stance
toward death and health, it seems fair to say that we are all Hobbesian
now. However, it is important to note that this stance toward death as
something fearsome, which should be deferred as long as possible,
marks a crucial divergence from the long trace of the western philo-
sophical and religious tradition. In general, death had been portrayed
in that moral tradition as a passage to another, more important realm
outside of time (Epicurus being a notable exception to this rule). From
Plato – who had Socrates proclaim in the Phaedo that ‘as the true
philosophers are ever studying death, to them, of all men, death is the
least terrible’ (1973: 499) – to Calvin – who claimed that Christians
should ‘ardently long for death, and constantly meditate upon it’ (1845:
II, 290) – death was treated not as something to be feared and avoided
at any cost, but as something that a truly virtuous person would gladly
embrace when honor or faith required it.14 This willingness to sacrifice
one’s life was, of course, an ideal that few would ever attain, but the
moral heroes of the western tradition, from Socrates to Thomas More,
were martyrs of one sort or another. For Hobbes, in contrast, martyr-
dom was a particularly vexing issue.
Although Hobbes did not discuss the possibility of immortality in
the first two parts of Leviathan, in the third part, ‘Of a Christian
Commonwealth’, he recognized that there was something beyond the
limit of death. Such recognition, of course, opened up the politically
disruptive possibility of martyrdom, and Hobbes went to great lengths
to minimize the problems posed by this traditional ideal. At one point
he conceded that if the sovereign issued a command that ‘cannot be
obeyed, without [the subject] being damned to eternal death, then it
were madness to obey it’ (1962: 424). However, such a voluntary relin-
quishment of one’s time on earth flew in the face of Hobbes’ dictum
that people can, and should, do anything possible to save their earthly
lives, so he offered a lesson to help believers ‘to distinguish well between
what is, and what is not necessary to eternal salvation’. Hobbes’
conclusion was that ‘[a]ll that is NECESSARY to salvation is contained
in two virtues, faith in Christ, and obedience to Laws’ (1962: 425).
While this lesson still left open the possibility of the law’s demanding
that a person renounce his or her faith, Hobbes counseled sovereigns
against ever putting their subjects in a position where they would have
to choose between saving their earthly or their immortal lives. And in
regard to the subjects, Hobbes claimed that as ‘for their faith, it is
internal, and invisible; they have the licence that Naaman had, and need
not put themselves into danger for it’ (1962: 436). So even if an ‘infidel
sovereign’ was foolish enough to demand of his or her subjects that they
renounce their faith, Hobbes argued that Christian subjects did not need
to die for that faith, but only maintain their inner, invisible belief.
617
Hobbes’ position on martyrdom, like his concern with health and
longevity, has left its mark on modern western subjects, as even those
who profess religious faith today respond with incredulity to the
growing number of young Islamic men and women who are eager to
die for their faith in the struggle against the infidel West.
In Leviathan, and in Hobbes’ personal behavior, there is no vestige
of that traditional longing for death that Plato urged on philosophers,
Calvin urged on Christians, and some radical mullahs urge today on
Islamists. Indeed, I would like to suggest, Foucault’s objections notwith-
standing, that the Hobbesian subject was a harbinger of precisely the
sort of health-conscious, death-deferring individuals that would be
produced and governed by bio-power. In the 17th century, however, the
Hobbesian subject was a radical and disturbing image, due to the
controversy that surrounded the very meaning of the natural law of self-
preservation upon which Hobbes, as well as other liberal philosophers,
grounded their conceptions of rational individuality. This controversy
is revealed most clearly in regard to an issue that was even more disturb-
ing than martyrdom for 17th-century liberals – suicide.
Hobbes and the 17th-century suicide debate
In general, attitudes toward suicide in early-modern Europe were shaped

by the traditional Christian condemnation of the termination of one’s
own life as the sin of ‘self-murder’. This tradition began with Augus-
tine’s determination in the 5th century that the taking of one’s life
violated the biblical injunction against murder (Augustine, 1948: 27–34;
also 474–8). In the 6th century suicides were denied Christian burial
rights, and in the 13th century they could no longer be buried in
hallowed ground (Williams, 1966: 257–8; also see Alvarez, 1990: 89;
and Fedden, 1972: 133–4). Over the course of the Middle Ages the
punishments grew more severe as ignominious burial practices, derived
from pre-Christian folklore, were added to the religious sanctions. These
degrading additions varied from region to region, but they usually had
to do with the liminal aspect of the suicide, who had chosen to abandon
the community of the living but was denied entry into the community
of the dead. The ghosts of these unfortunate individuals were thought
to be ‘on an eternally unfinished journey . . . [and] were believed to be
restless and malevolent’ (MacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 47). In
England, for instance, the bodies of suicides were sometimes hung on
gibbets and allowed to rot. More frequently, the naked body was buried
at night, face down in a grave dug in a highway or a crossroads, and a
wooden stake was driven through the body pinning it to that spot.
Various interpretations of the significance of such roadside burials have
618
been offered, such as beliefs that constant traffic would help to keep the
ghost down, or the ghost would become confused by the various roads,
or the sign of the cross would help dispel any evil energy emanating
from the corpse of the suicide. In France and Germany suicides were
often dragged through the streets to a place of execution, where they
were hung on chains and left to rot, and in some parts of France the
bodies were burned or tossed on public refuse heaps. In certain cities,
such as Metz and Strasburg, the bodies were placed in barrels and set
adrift down rivers (Williams, 1966: 257–61; Fedden, 1972: 139–41;
MacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 15–19; Alvarez, 1990: 64–5; Crocker,
1952: 50; and Noon, 1978: 372).
Along with this degrading treatment of the body of the suicide, the
Middle Ages also saw the emergence of the legal punishment of the
suicide’s heirs through forfeiture laws that confiscated some, if not all,
of the suicide’s property. In England, if a death was suspected of being
a suicide the coroner was required to convene a jury of local citizens to
posthumously determine whether the individual was guilty of felo de se
(literally, a felony of oneself), or was non compos mentis (not of sound
mind), and therefore not subject to punishment. If the verdict was felo
de se not only was the body denied a Christian burial, but that person’s
‘moveable goods, including tools, household items, money, debts owed
to them, and even leases on the land that they had worked were forfeited
to the crown or to the holder of a royal patent who possessed the right
to such windfalls in a particular place’ (MacDonald and Murphy, 1990:
15–18; also see Williams, 1966: 261–4; and Fedden, 1972: 137–9). In
France as well, the property of the suicide was confiscated by the Crown,
and this practice, along with the degrading burial practices, was codified
in the Ordonnance criminelle de 1670, which ‘for the first time grouped
suicide with the major crimes of heresy and lèse-majesté’ (Crocker,
1952: 50; also see Alvarez, 1990: 65–6; and Fedden, 1972: 190–2).
These legal punishments of suicide lasted well into the modern period.
In England, the last recorded ignominious burial of a suicide occurred
in 1823, although the forfeiture law remained in place until 1870
(Alvarez, 1990: 64–6; Williams, 1966: 259–62; and Fedden, 1972: 141,
192–3). The French law against suicide remained in effect until 1770,
when the degradations of the body were abolished and proper burials
allowed for suicides, and the forfeiture laws lapsed with the Revolution
(Fedden, 1972: 223).
Although these various medieval punishments of suicide were avail-
able throughout the early-modern period, they were not uniformly
imposed from the 16th through the 18th centuries. In Sleepless Souls:
Suicide in Early Modern England, Michael MacDonald and Terence R.
Murphy claim that these punishments were infrequently employed prior
to 1500, but that ‘[t]he rigour with which the law against suicide was
619
enforced in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries distinguishes
this period from the centuries before and afterwards’ (1990: 16). They
identify the period between 1500 and 1660 as the ‘era of severity’ in
the punishment of suicide, and note that after that point suicide became
‘secularized’, and the frequency and severity of the punishments dimin-
ished throughout the 18th century until the legal punishments were
ultimately repealed. Although MacDonald and Murphy’s study focuses
on England, the pattern they identify is generally true for much of
Europe. As Lester Crocker noted, ‘seventeenth-century France, in the
totality of its attitude, severely condemned suicide’, but in the 18th
century this hostility began to flag (1952: 224–7).
Hobbes’ political theory emerged toward the end of the era of
severity, but his position on suicide was actually a precursor of the more
lenient attitude that would eventually prevail throughout Europe. In
fact, the Oxford English Dictionary claims that the word ‘suicide’ first
appeared as a less pejorative alternative to self-murder in 1651, the year
Leviathan was published.15 To appreciate the prescience of Hobbes’
stance toward suicide, one must have some sense of the larger discur-
sive context in which the practice was addressed. From the 16th through
the 18th centuries, philosophers, clerics, essayists and learned gentlemen
were engaged in a very heated debate about suicide, although the terms
of this debate shifted over time. During the late 16th and 17th centuries,
when the punitive attitude waxed throughout Europe, suicide was
discussed primarily in terms of the natural law of self-preservation,
while in the 18th century, as the punishments of suicide waned, the
terms of the debate shifted to self-ownership. The conceptual shift from
self-preservation to self-ownership is beyond the scope of this article,
however.16 My concern here lies primarily with the unique position that
Hobbes’ conception of corporeal self-preservation held in the early-
modern suicide debate. To provide a sense of the significance of Hobbes’
contribution to this debate, I will contrast two of the earliest sustained
arguments for and against suicide that appeared in the 17th century,
and then position Hobbes in relation to these other voices.
In 1637 the Puritan cleric John Sym published the first full-length
English treatise against suicide, Lifes Preservative Against Self-Killing
or, An Useful Treatise Concerning Life and Self-Murder, in response to
what he perceived as a suicide epidemic that was sweeping across
England (Sym, 1988: unpaginated preface; also see Fedden, 1972:
183–5; and Sprott, 1961: 30). In his extensive argument Sym relied quite
heavily on Augustine’s claim that the Fifth Commandment prohibited
the murder of oneself as well as others, but he combined this traditional
judgment with the natural law of self-preservation, corporeally under-
stood, and concluded that self-murder was more heinous than any other
crime, including the murder of another:
620
Here is now the speciall difference of this sort of murder, wherby it tran-
scends, and is distinguished from all other murders; and consists in restraint
of the act of killing, in regard of its individual object, to a mans own life
& self; which is the greatest and cruellest act of hostility in the world: when
a man, who by nature is most bound to preserve himselfe, reflects upon
himselfe, to destroy himselfe; the horriblenes whereof is so monstrous, that
we read no law made against it, as if it were a thing not to bee supposed
possible. And this sinne of all others is most against the Law of nature, for
that self-preservation, armes a man to turne upon others, unlawfully
invading him to kill him. (1988: 53–4)
Beyond outlawing the conscious taking of one’s own life, which he

identified as ‘direct self-murder’, Sym also used the natural law of self-
preservation to condemn the much broader category of ‘indirect self-
murder’, which he defined as the intentional pursuit of some good by
means that expose one to mortal danger ‘without any respect, or expec-
tation of death thereupon ensuing’ (1988: 85–6). He further divided this
category of indirect self-murder into deaths that occurred due to
commission, such as the excessive use of food or drink, or association
with dangerous individuals, and deaths that resulted from omission,
such as refusals of necessary medicine or surgery, or refusals to flee from
avoidable dangers (1988: 91–100). This category of indirect self-murder
involves behavioral requirements that were very much like those Hobbes
followed in his personal life, such as taking care of his health and fleeing
the Civil Wars, but there is an important difference in the justification
Hobbes and Sym relied upon to support such behavior. For Sym would
have his readers avoid dangerous commissions and omissions in order
to escape the sin of self-murder, thereby preserving their souls, while
Hobbes followed such advice on the basis of his rational commitment
to the natural law of self-preservation, and the desire to add a few years
to his earthly life. In other words, Sym’s embrace of corporeal self-
preservation involved a tension with his other-worldly commitments,
while Hobbes’ embrace of this concept was free from any such tension.
Although Sym’s hostility to suicide was indicative of the punitive
attitude that prevailed in the 16th and 17th centuries, there were at that
time a few voices raised in opposition to the punishment of self-murder.
In the late 16th century Montaigne published essays that endorsed some
prominent Roman suicides (one of which I will briefly discuss at the end
of this article), but the first treatise-length defense of suicide was written
in 1608 by John Donne, a young poet but not yet cleric, under the
unwieldy title of Biathanatos: A Declaration of that Paradoxe, or
Thesis, that Self-homicide is not so Naturally Sinne, that it may never
be otherwise. This work is divided into three parts, each of which deals
with a specific type of law that might be used to ground the prohibi-
tion against suicide: the law of nature; the law of reason; and finally,
621
the law of God. Only the first part concerns us here, and in regard to
the natural law Donne ‘confessed’ that self-preservation was its foun-
dation, but he also noted that as it applied to humans this law was not
a simple matter (1930: 49). According to Donne, natural law was
comprised of two separate yet related elements, which he identified as
the ‘sensitive’ and ‘rational’ laws of nature (1930: 38). The sensitive law
of nature is equivalent to corporeal self-preservation, and Donne
claimed that ‘it extends to beasts more then [sic] to us, because they
cannot compare degrees of obligation and distinctions of duties and
offices, as we can’ (1930: 44–5). In humans, this sensitive dimension
‘doth naturally lead and conduce to’ the rational dimension, which he
described as ‘that light which God hath afforded us of his eternall law;
and which is usually called recta ratio. Now this law of nature . . . is
onely in man and in him directed upon Piety, Religion, Sociablenesse;
and such for as it reacheth to the preservation both of Species and indi-
viduals’ (1930: 38, 39).
In regard to suicide, Donne assumed that the natural law argument
against the practice relied more upon the rational dimension than the
sensitive. For he recognized that if the opposition to suicide was
grounded in the sensitive, or corporeal, aspect of natural law, the impli-
cations would indeed be much more radical than these opponents under-
stood. ‘I think this is not the [sensitive] law of nature which these
abhorrers of SELF-HOMICIDE complaine to bee violated by that Act’,
Donne argued. ‘For so they might as well accuse all discipline and
austeritie, and affectation of Martyrdome, which are as contrarie to the
Law of sensitive Nature’ (1930: 39). Donne seems to have correctly
understood the implications of such a corporeal natural law argument,
but he could not imagine that the abhorrers of suicide would go that
far in their opposition. In fact, Sym did not follow the logic of corporeal
self-preservation to this conclusion, but explicitly excepted martyrdom
from the prohibition against self-murder, and argued that ‘a man ought
to expose his life to death, in causes concerning religion . . . when a man
is desired, commanded, or threatened to doe any sinne forbidden by
Gods word; that then hee doe it not, although he therefore doe die’
(1988: 149; also see 149–52). As we saw earlier, however, Hobbes was
much less hesitant than Sym to fully embrace the consequences of the
corporeal conception of self-preservation, and explicitly challenged the
traditional ideal of martyrdom by arguing that no one ever need die for
their faith.
Since Donne could not imagine that the sensitive law of nature
would be invoked to ground the prohibition of suicide, he concentrated
on the rational law of nature, but found this an insufficient foundation
as well. As he understood that dimension of natural law which applied
exclusively to humans, it actually imposed duties and obligations that
622
could, on occasion, cause individuals to neglect their own corporeal
preservation, or that of the species. He cited celibacy as an example of
a morally appropriate choice for some individuals, even though such a
choice hindered the preservation of the species (1930: 45). And far from
treating martyrdom as an exception to the law of self-preservation, as
Sym did, or as a violation of that law, as Hobbes in effect did, Donne
instead argued that ‘the desire of Martyrdome, though the body perish,
is a Self-preservation, because thereby out of our election our best part
is advanc’d’ (1930: 49). By the same token, suicide could sometimes be
the best choice for an individual, if it would allow him or her to preserve
something higher than mere physical existence. In all these cases, Donne
argued, ‘[t]he like danger is in deducing consequences from this naturall
Law, of Selfe-preservation; which doth not so rigorously, and urgently,
and illimitedly binde, but that by the Law of Nature it selfe, things may,
yea must neglect themselves for others’ (1930: 46).
Donne’s and Sym’s divergence over the issue of suicide is best
explained not by any difference in their commitment to Christianity, but
rather by their different interpretations of the natural law of self-preser-
vation. Sym held a corporeal conception of self-preservation that was
very close to that of Hobbes, although unlike Hobbes, he also tried to
simultaneously maintain the other-worldly ethos of Christianity. Suicide
was a violation of both scriptural and natural law, and Sym therefore
condemned it as the most heinous crime imaginable. However, Donne’s
conception of the rational element of self-preservation was closer to that
of the Stoics and pre-modern Christians than it was to Hobbes. For
Donne, the preservation of the soul, or virtue, took precedence over the
mere prolongation of the life of the flesh, and consequently he could
endorse both self-preservation and suicide without contradiction, as did
the Stoics. Unfortunately, this traditional dimension of Biathanatos is
often overlooked by those who (over-)emphasize the individualistic and
relativistic dimensions of Donne’s book, and herald it as one of the
earliest articulations of a uniquely modern stance toward suicide (e.g.
Sprott, 1961: 23, also 20–1; Fedden, 1972: 182, 135–6; and Alvarez,
1990: 176–7). On his own account, Donne wrote Biathanatos precisely
to challenge the modern, corporeal notion of self-preservation held by
those who attack suicide, as well as to comfort those who could not, in
good conscience, abide by the increasingly strident screeds against self-
destruction that were generated by that concept:
I thought it therefore needfull, to oppose this defensative, as well to re-
encourage men to a just contempt of this life, and to restore them to their
nature, which is a desire of supreame happiness in the next life by the loss
of this, as also to rectify, and wash again their same, who religiously
assuring themselves that in some cases, when wee were destitute of other
meanes, we might be to our selves the stewards of Gods benefits, and the
Ministers of his mercifull Justice. (1930: 216)
623
Since Hobbes’ understanding of self-preservation was closer to Sym’s
than Donne’s, one might expect him to have shared Sym’s extreme
hostility toward self-murder, but surprisingly, he took a position on
suicide that was actually closer to that of Donne, although for very
different reasons than those offered in Biathanatos (see Stoffell, 1991:
26–33; and MacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 141). Although Hobbes
apparently considered suicide when he fell ill while finishing Leviathan
in France (Stephen, 1904: 41),17 he did not spend much time discussing
this issue in that book, but simply declared that the law of self-preser-
vation precluded the exercise of natural right in a manner that would
cause one’s death. However, in A Dialogue Between a Philosopher and
a Student of the Common Laws of England, which was written between
1662 and 1675 and published posthumously in 1681, Hobbes discussed
suicide in the context of a conversation concerning felonies. When the
law student claimed that not only the common law, but statutory law
as well, recognized suicide as felo de se, the philosopher responded by
saying:
I conceive not how any Man can bear Animum felleum, or so much Malice
towards himself, as to hurt himself voluntarily, much less to kill himself;
for naturally, and necessarily the Intention of every Man aimeth at
somewhat, which is good to himself, and tendeth to his preservation: and
therefore, methinks, if he kill himself, it is to be presumed that he is not
compos mentis, but by some inward torment or Apprehension of somewhat
worse than Death, Distracted. (1971: 116–17)
When the student replied that it was necessary to prove that individuals
were compos mentis before they could be deemed felo de se, the philoso-
pher wondered, ‘How can that be proved of a Man dead; especially if
it cannot be proved by any Witnesses, that a little before his death he
spake as other men used to do. This is a hard place; and before you
take it for Common-Law it had need to be clear’d’ (1971: 117).
Hobbes’ lenient position on suicide, therefore, was distinct not only
from Sym’s hostile stance, but from Donne’s moderate position as well.
Given his non-corporeal conception of self-preservation, Donne could
allow that suicide might be a form of self-preservation in some circum-
stances, but for Hobbes suicide was clearly a violation of the law of self-
preservation in the corporeal sense in which he, and Sym, understood
it. Yet unlike Sym and the many other 17th-century condemners of
suicide, Hobbes did not feel compelled to punish this violation. Ironi-
cally, Hobbes’ moderate stance toward suicide can be explained
precisely by his unalloyed embrace of the corporeal law of self-
preservation. For Hobbes had no doubt that all living things aim at their
own preservation, and because his commitment to the other-worldly
ethos of Christianity was rhetorical at best, he also had no moral
compunction about claiming that individuals ought to do whatever was
624
required to preserve their earthly lives. Suicide, therefore, was clearly
evidence of some form of mental illness or imbalance, and he could not
imagine punishing anyone whose mind was so deranged that he or she
could actually end their own life. But for Sym there was still a funda-
mental ambivalence between the other-worldly ethos he shared with
Donne, and the corporeal conception of self-preservation that was
ascending in the 17th century. Suicide was one point on which the
corporeal law of self-preservation and the Augustinian Christian ethos
were in agreement, and Sym’s exceedingly harsh judgment of suicide
allowed him to resolve that inherent tension between the two ethical
registers he was trying to embrace.
As the corporeal understanding of self-preservation gradually
eclipsed the other-worldly ethos of Christianity, the hostility against
suicide waned, and by the end of the 18th century the general judgment
of suicide was close to the lenient position struck by Hobbes over a
century earlier. Suicide came to be ‘regarded as a secular calamity – the
consequence of mental disease – rather than a diabolical crime’, accord-
ing to MacDonald and Murphy, and consequently ‘more and more juries
returned verdicts that labelled suicides as innocent mad people’ (1990:
133). This humane Hobbesian stance toward suicide, I would like to
suggest, fits quite well with the exercise of bio-power in a system of
governmentality. Since Hobbesian subjects could be counted upon to
pursue corporeal preservation without any compunction whatsoever,
suicide was best viewed as a medical problem that should be treated not
by punishments inflicted by agents of the sovereign, but rather by mental
health professionals who aimed at maintaining a healthy, productive
population.
In the last decade of the 20th century, however, certain challenges to
this governmental stance toward suicide have appeared, indicating that
the prevailing order of corporeal preservation may be on the verge of a
fundamental transformation. For aside from the growing numbers of
individuals who now consider suicide as an individual right, rather than
a symptom of mental illness, the mental health professions themselves
also seem to be modifying their position on suicide. In the 1990s, studies
of American mental health professionals and counselors found that over
80 per cent thought suicide could indeed be a rational choice in certain
circumstances (Werth and Liddle, 1994: 440–8; and Rogers et al., 2001:
369). But the legal and medical recognition of the reasonableness of
suicide alone poses no significant challenge to the system of governmen-
tality, since the criteria for allowable suicides under Oregon’s Death with
Dignity Act, as well as the criteria for ‘rational suicide’ identified in
surveys of mental health professionals, require that the suicide request
be verified as reasonable by a physician and/or mental health
professional.18 Suicides performed under such requirements, far from
625
challenging the juridico-medical complex of modernity, would instead
render suicide a safe practice, and lead ultimately to the medicalization
of suicide.19 In order to take greater advantage of the opportunity that
this recently asserted right provides for a fundamental reconsideration of
the subject of governmentality, whose life is ordered upon the impera-
tive of corporeal preservation, it is helpful to contrast Foucault’s late-
modern position on suicide with the modern one of Hobbes.
Foucault on suicide
In a 1983 interview that was published in English as ‘Social Security’,

Foucault discussed the necessity of limiting the level of security that the
state could be expected to provide individuals, indirectly indicating how
far we have come since the 17th-century concern with establishing a
theoretical foundation upon which the security state could be erected.
During this interview he described the current experience of death, and
employed terms quite different than those famously fearsome phrases
used by Hobbes. ‘Generally speaking,’ Foucault remarked, ‘people die
under a blanket of drugs, if not in some accident, so that they lose
consciousness entirely in a few hours, a few days, or a few weeks: they
are obliterated. We live in a world in which the medical and pharma-
ceutical accompaniment of death deprives it of much of its pain and
drama’ (1988: 177). While Foucault cautioned against nostalgia for a
more authentic experience of death that probably never existed, he was
nevertheless disturbed by the meaninglessness of the current experience,
and ended the interview with the suggestion, ‘Let’s try rather to give
meaning and beauty to death-obliteration’ (1988: 177). What Foucault
had in mind for such meaning and beauty was intimated earlier in the
interview, when he discussed the issue of suicide.
In response to questions about the best approach for limiting
demands on the health care system, Foucault emphasized that ‘the
decisions made ought to be the effect of a kind of ethical consensus so
that the individual may recognize himself in the decisions made and in
the values that inspired them’ (1988: 174). When the interviewer asked,
‘How, in fact, can the social security system contribute to an ethics of
the human person?’, Foucault answered:
The idea of bringing together individuals and the decision-making centers
ought to involve, at least as a consequence, a recognized right for every-
body to kill himself when he wishes in decent conditions. . . . If I won a
few billion francs in the national lottery, I’d set up an institute where people
who wanted to die could come and spend a weekend, a week or a month,
enjoying themselves as far as possible, perhaps with the help of drugs, and
then disappear, as if by obliteration.
626
When the interviewer queried, ‘A right to suicide?’ Foucault simply
replied, ‘Yes’ (1988: 176).
While it may be tempting to draw a link between the right to die
movement and Foucault’s off-hand remarks about a ‘right’ to kill
oneself in some sort of suicide institute, there is an important differ-
ence between his position and the liberal one articulated by, for
instance, the Dream Team. As mentioned in the introduction to this
article, the liberal argument for the right to die is concerned with
providing to individuals enough control over their deaths so they can
avoid a painful and/or degrading demise, while simultaneously main-
taining the integrity of juridico-medical authority that is aimed at
preserving life. Foucault’s claims about suicide, in contrast, emerged
out of an aesthetic concern with the nature of one’s life, rather than
the circumstances of one’s death. This aesthetic sensibility was clearly,
if somewhat hyperbolically, displayed in a brief 1979 essay on suicide,
‘The Simplest of Pleasures’, in which Foucault criticized the common
judgment that ‘homosexuals often commit suicide’ (1996a: 295). He
himself tried to commit suicide more than once while a student at the
École Normale, and the immediate explanation offered by mental
health professionals, as well as biographers later on, relied on this same
psychological account of the gay proclivity toward suicide (Eribon,
1991: 26–7; and Miller, 1993: 54–5). Foucault scornfully dismissed this
‘ludicrous account’ in which ‘suicide and homosexuals are portrayed
so as to make each other look bad’, and preferred instead to ‘see what
there is to say in favor of suicide’ (1996a: 295).
The primary benefit he identified with suicide was not release from
a ‘bad’ death, as liberals tend to argue, but rather the enhancement of
one’s entire life through the careful planning and consideration of how
one would eventually end one’s life. ‘One has to prepare it, bit by bit,’
he claimed, ‘decorate it, arrange the details, find the ingredients, imagine
it, choose it, get advice on it, shave it into a work without spectators,
one which exists only for oneself, just for that shortest little moment of
life.’ Suicide should be recognized as ‘an extremely unique experience
. . . which above all the rest deserves the greatest attention – not that it
shouldn’t worry you (or comfort you) – but rather so that you can make
of it a fathomless pleasure whose patient and relentless preparation will
enlighten all of your life’ (1996a: 296). As possible ways of ending one’s
life Foucault mentioned, perhaps facetiously, ‘[s]uicide festivals or
orgies’, as well as the suicide centers he would suggest later in the ‘Social
Security’ interview (1988: 296–7). Whether or not he was serious about
these extreme suggestions, they should not detract from what I take to
be the most important aspect of Foucault’s stance toward suicide, which
is that the deliberate, anticipatory consideration of one’s chosen death
can help individuals to live more reflective, but not necessarily more
authentic, lives.20
627
Of course, many ancient schools of thought taught the benefits of
reflection upon one’s death, if not suicide, but Foucault claimed in ‘The
Simplest of Pleasures’ that ‘[t]he philosophies that promise to teach us
what to think about death and how to die bore me to tears’ (1996a:
296). He eventually overcame this boredom, however, and turned to
precisely these ancient schools of thought in his last courses and publi-
cations from the early 1980s. His 1981–2 course at the Collège de
France, for instance, ‘was devoted to the formation of the theme of the
hermeneutic of the self’, and examined Platonic, Epicurean and Stoic
texts. Among the various techniques employed in shaping subjects in
the ancient world, Foucault found ‘at the apex of all these exercises . . .
the famous melete thanatou – a meditation on death or, rather, a training
for it’. In his course résumé Foucault described this technique in terms
that starkly distinguish it from the use to which Hobbes put the thought
of death in the 17th century:
What accounts for the particular value of the death meditation is not just
the fact that it anticipates what is generally held to be the greatest misfor-
tune; it is not just that it enables one to convince oneself that death is not
an evil; it offers the possibility of looking back, in advance as it were, on
one’s life. (1997b: 105)
There is an obviously important difference between thinking about

one’s eventual death, on the one hand, and thinking about taking one’s
life, on the other, and many ancient schools of thought, such as Platon-
ism, encouraged the former while condemning the latter. Stoicism,
however, explicitly linked the melete thanatou and suicide, and Foucault
was keenly interested in this school in the last years of his life. Seneca, in
particular, appeared in his 1981–2 course, and also figured prominently
in his last publication, The Care of the Self, where this Roman Stoic was
frequently cited to provide examples of the ancient imperative to perpet-
ually cultivate oneself (1986: 39–68). Unfortunately for our purposes, the
discussion of Seneca in The Care of the Self was focused largely on sexual
pleasures, passions and desires, and not on the melete thanatou or suicide.
However, Foucault did discuss Seneca’s stance toward death in an import-
ant interview conducted just five months before he died, titled ‘The Ethics
of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom’.
Although this late interview was concerned primarily with the
second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality, at one point an
interviewer asked about the relation between Foucault’s recent interest
in the care of the self and a theme that concerned him throughout his
career: ‘But doesn’t the human condition, in terms of its finitude, play
a very important role here? . . . It seems to me that this problem of
finitude is very important; the fear of death, of finitude, of being hurt,
is at the heart of the care for self’ (1997a: 289; for an alternative trans-
lation, see Foucault, 1987: 9).21 Foucault responded to this crucial
628
question by contrasting the Greco-Roman stance toward death, particu-
larly that of the Stoics, with that of Christianity:
Christianity, by presenting salvation as occurring beyond life, in a way
upsets or at least disturbs the balance of the care of the self. . . . Among
the Greeks and Romans, however, given that one takes care of oneself in
one’s own life, and that the reputation one leaves behind is the only after-
life one can expect, the care of the self can be centered entirely on oneself,
on what one does, on the place one occupies among others. It can be
centered totally on the acceptance of death – this will become quite evident
in late Stoicism – and can even, up to a point, become almost a desire for
death. . . . In Seneca, for example, it is interesting to note the importance
of the theme, let us hurry and get old, let us hasten toward the end, so that
we may thereby come back to ourselves. This type of moment before death,
when nothing more can happen, is different from the desire for death one
finds among Christians, who expect salvation through death. It is like the
movement to rush through life to the point where there is no longer
anything ahead but the possibility of death. (1997a: 289; cf. 1987: 9)
Although there certainly is room to challenge Foucault’s claims about

the Stoic stance toward death and the afterlife, not to mention the value
that the Stoics placed upon worldly reputation, this is not the place to
engage in these quarrels. What is crucial for our purposes is that
Foucault clearly appreciated Stoicism’s undeniable acceptance of death
as an unavoidable and natural part of life, and not as a punishment that
needs to be avenged by a savior, as in Christianity, or as an evil that
needs to be postponed as long as possible, as in Hobbesian modernity.
While Seneca’s longing for death was particularly intriguing to
Foucault, it is important to note that Seneca also emphatically endorsed
suicide as a crucial facet of the care of the self. Although Foucault did
not discuss Seneca’s stance toward suicide in any of the interviews,
courses, or publications from the 1980s, his claims about suicide in ‘The
Simplest of Pleasures’ were remarkably similar to the advice Seneca
offered in letters to his friend Lucilius. For instance, while Foucault
claimed that one’s suicide is a project that ‘exists only for oneself’,
Seneca wrote:
Nowhere should we indulge the soul more than in dying. Let it go as it
lists: if it craves the sword or the noose or some potion that constricts the
veins, on with it, let it break the chain of its slavery. A man’s life should
satisfy other people as well, his death only himself, and whatever sort he
likes is best. (Seneca, 1958: 204; also see Motto, 1973: 76; and Alvarez,
1990: 80)
Both also seemed to agree that one ought to think about, and be ready
to perform (rather than commit), one’s suicide, and Foucault would
likely concur with Seneca’s judgment that ‘[i]t is a great man who not
629
only orders his own death but contrives it’ (1958: 207). Despite this
shared appreciation of the benefits of planning how one would end one’s
life under certain circumstances, there is nevertheless a particular
tension between Seneca and Foucault in regard to one aspect of suicide
– its emancipatory potential.
Seneca frequently employed the language of liberation in discussing
suicide, as when he described suicide as ‘break[ing] through the
trammels of human bondage’, or wrote that ‘a scalpel opens the way
out to the great emancipation’ (1958: 205). At other points he used the
language of freedom, but still in the sense of liberation. For instance, in
his criticism of those ‘professed philosophers who assert that . . . we
must wait . . . for the end Nature has decreed’, Seneca argued that ‘[t]he
man who says this does not see that he has blocked his road to freedom’
(1958: 204). Foucault, however, had ‘always been somewhat suspicious
of the notion of liberation’ because it implied there was some essential
self that could be emancipated (1997a: 282; cf. 1987: 2). He preferred
instead to ‘emphasize practices of freedom over processes of liberation’,
and in clarifying his conception of freedom he explicitly endorsed the
Greco-Roman model in which ‘the care of the self was the mode in
which individual freedom . . . was reflected as an ethics’ (1997a: 283–4;
cf. 1987: 3–4). He emphasized that ‘extensive work by the self on the
self is required for this practice of freedom to take shape in an ethos
that is good, beautiful, honorable, estimable, memorable, and exem-
plary’ (1997a: 286; cf. 1987: 6). Certainly, the Stoics embraced this
conception of working on oneself, and Seneca thought that the tech-
nique of reflecting on how and when one would perform suicide was
crucial to the formation of an exemplary life. In fact, he advised Lucilius
that ‘it is most essential to keep our end in mind. Other exercises’, such
as the anticipation of losing one’s wealth, health, or loved ones, ‘may
prove futile’, because one might never face circumstances that would
test these characteristics. But he emphasized that reflecting about
whether or not one should continue living was training that ‘must one
day be put to use’ (1958: 205).
So to the extent that Seneca thought the act of suicide was an eman-
cipation of the individual from a burdensome or vexing life, Foucault
would part company with the sage and treat such a death as a termin-
ation rather than a liberation, but to the extent that Seneca thought that
reflection on suicide was itself a source of freedom, Foucault would
certainly concur. For both believed that the practice of thinking about
the trajectory and shape one’s life has taken, in order to determine
whether one should continue to live, provided a valuable opportunity
to periodically judge the quality of one’s life. What Foucault said of the
melete thanatou holds true for the meditation on suicide as well – ‘it is
a way of making death actual in life. . . . It tends to make one live each
630
day as if it were the last’ (1997b: 104). And for Seneca, such medita-
tion was crucial in instilling in individuals the central lesson of Stoicism:
Living is not the good, but living well. The wise man . . . lives as long as
he should, not as long as he can. He will observe where he is to live, with
whom, how, and what he is to do. He will always think of life in terms of
quality, not quantity. (1958: 202)
Without doubt, many contemporary arguments for the right to die

also emphasize ‘quality of life’, but such quality is determined by the
conditions of a person’s impending death, and is fundamentally different
than the determination of quality that Seneca and Foucault had in mind.
According to these current arguments, death is an appropriate choice
when illness or age has brought a person close to death and robbed him
or her of the ability to take care of his or her own bodily functions, experi-
ence worldly pleasures or interact meaningfully with others. The quality-
of-life considerations Seneca and Foucault thought relevant for the suicide
decision, on the other hand, were not determined by the conditions of a
person’s imminent death, but were rather focused upon the moral and
aesthetic quality of the life the person had actually lived. If it would be
difficult to continue living a good and beautiful life, whether or not death
is imminent, then suicide may be the appropriate choice. This emphasis
on the moral and aesthetic quality of one’s life, instead of the circum-
stances of one’s death, is reflected in Cicero’s shocking claim that Stoics
frequently judged it best to end their lives at a moment of ‘supreme happi-
ness’. A provocative example of just such a suicide was provided by the
essayist Montaigne, who preceded Donne in challenging the punitive
attitude toward suicide that emerged at the outset of modernity. In his
essay ‘The Custom of the Isle of Cea’ (1573–4), Montaigne approvingly
recounted Sextus Pompeius’ account of the suicide of an elderly, respected
woman of authority from this island. Although Sextus Pompeius tried to
convince her to abandon her publicly announced intention of taking her
own life, she justified her decision by saying: ‘For my part, having always
experienced the favorable face of Fortune, lest the desire to live too long
may make me see one of her contrary faces, I am going to dismiss the
remains of my soul by a happy end, leaving two daughters of my own
and a legion of grandchildren’ (Montaigne, 1958: 251).22
Conclusion
Over the course of his career Foucault revealed that modernity is

grounded in a dual inversion in the status of death, both in the realm of
medicine and in the exercise of power. On Foucault’s account the illumi-
nation of death by pathological anatomy provided an epistemological
631
foundation not only for medicine, but for the human sciences in general,
and the knowledge generated by these disciplines helped facilitate the
transition from the sovereign’s power of life and death to the positive,
productive form of power that administers and optimizes life in
modernity. I have tried to show, over Foucault’s objections, that Hobbes’
political theory reflects a third inversion of the status of death that is
integrally related to those inversions identified by Foucault. Rather than
longing for death, as urged in the Platonic/Christian tradition, the
Hobbesian subject feared death and sought to preserve life above all
else, and such subjects were therefore precisely the sort who were
amenable to governmental techniques and strategies that aimed at
promoting the health and longevity of the population. Recently, the
success of the modern project of death deferral has generated a variety
of divisive bio-ethical dilemmas, but the return of the public discussion
of suicide at the turn of the 21st century provides a more fertile oppor-
tunity than any other bio-ethical issue for a fundamental challenge to
the juridico-medical complex of modernity. When considered in the
context of the early-modern suicide debate, the current assertion of the
right to die throws into relief, and opens to contestation, the comple-
mentary roles that the imperative of corporeal preservation and medical
authority have played in governing Hobbesian subjects.
Liberal arguments for the right to die, such as that offered by the
Dream Team, do indeed challenge the modern, Hobbesian stance
toward death (as something to be deferred as long as possible) and
suicide (as the result of mental illness), but these arguments still rely, as
did Hobbes’ political theory, on the fear of death. The death feared by
liberal proponents of the right to die, however, is not the violent, prema-
ture death that terrified Hobbes in the 17th century, but rather a
prolonged, gradual death that is the promise/threat offered by modern
medical culture.23 While the Dream Team claims that ‘[m]ost of us see
death – whatever we think will follow it – as the final act of life’s drama,
and we want that last act to reflect our own convictions, those we have
tried to live by’, their emphasis is on preventing ‘the convictions of
others [being] forced on us in our most vulnerable moment’ (Dworkin
et al., 1997: 44). For these liberals, ‘[d]eath is . . . among the most
significant events of life’ (1997: 44), but if one cannot control that event
the quality of one’s life is significantly diminished. In order to manage
this fear of a death that is controlled and imposed by medical author-
ity, the right to die movement ironically seeks to establish the right to
medical assistance in suicide and/or euthanasia. This goal of gaining
control over death will likely be unfulfilled as the legalization, rational-
ization and medicalization of suicide will render it a safe practice within
the administrative parameters of the juridico-medical order, but that is
not my primary objection to liberal claims about the right to die. Rather,
632
my concern is that by focusing on controlling one’s death this liberal
perspective does not foster critical reflection upon those convictions by
which one lives one’s life, and leaves unchallenged the role of medical
authority in shaping those convictions.
As a supplement, if not an alternative, to the standard liberal argu-
ments for the right to die, Foucault’s Stoic-inspired stance toward
suicide can help reveal certain hopeful possibilities that are overlooked
in the current discussion of this right. For as Seneca, Montaigne, Donne
and Foucault all understood, the self that ought to be preserved is not
simply the body, but the character of the life of that embodied self.
Although I am certainly not offering her as an example that ought to
necessarily be followed, reflection upon the suicide of the woman from
Cea might help us late-moderns recognize the extent to which we are
governed by the imperative of corporeal preservation that underlies the
medicalized culture of modernity. The calm, thoughtful suicide of this
woman who chose to end her life at a point when things were going
quite well, and her faculties remained intact, may seem scandalous to
those of us who, like Hobbes, live in order to avoid death. But to
imagine living one’s life with such an intense concern about one’s char-
acter, and the way one’s life was going, would generate greater possi-
bilities for the ‘practices of freedom’, in the Foucauldian sense, than will
bald assertions of the liberal right to end one’s life with a physician’s
help when death is already at hand. At best, this liberal stance can only
offer the quite likely hollow promise of providing control over one’s
death, while the Foucauldian/ Stoic stance offers the possibility of living
a more deliberate, reflective life that will nevertheless always remain
beyond one’s control.
The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, USA
PSC
Notes
1 This article is derived from fragments of several chapters of a larger project
that is tentatively titled ‘The Government(ality) of Health: Death, Medicine,
and the Health-Conscious Subject’.
2 One of the leading proponents of PAS and euthanasia in Australia is Dr.
Philip Nitschke, who is often portrayed as Australia’s equivalent of
America’s ‘Dr. Death’, Jack Kevorkian; see Beam, 2003; McInerney, 2000:
148; Mydans, 1997: 3; Singer, 1994: 138–9; and ERGO!: 2005.
3 ‘Dutch Upper House Backs Aided-Suicide’, The New York Times, 11 April
2001: sec. A, p. 3. For critical discussions of the Dutch practice of euthan-
asia and PAS, see: Smith, 2000: 109–11; Hendin, 1997: 49, 75–8; and
Welie, 1992: 423–7. For a more complete and less damning examination
633
of the Dutch experience with medically assisted death, see Pijnenborg et al.,
1993: 1196–9; Singer, 1994: 151–6; Battin, 2003: 402–5; and Battin, 1994:
130–44.
4 Washington et al. v. Glucksberg et al. (521 U.S. 702) and Vacco v. Quill
et al. (521 U.S. 793).
5 For a thorough discussion of Foucault’s reconsideration of his conception
of power during the second half of the 1970s, see Gordon, 2000; for a
shorter discussion see Rabinow, 1997: xv–xvii.
6 The status of The Birth of the Clinic does seem to be changing in certain
fields, however. In particular, British historians and sociologists of medicine
have begun to reconsider their initial hostility to this text; e.g. see Jones
and Porter, 1994: 10–11; Rose, 1994; and Armstrong, 2002: 178–9.
7 I link Foucault’s early claims from The Birth of the Clinic concerning the
significance of pathological anatomy, with his later concept of governmen-
tality, in Tierney, 1998.
8 Concerning the light by which Bichat illuminated the ‘abyss of illness’,
Foucault wrote that it is ‘the same light, no doubt, that illuminates the 120
Journees of Sodome, Juliette, and the Desastres de Soya’ (1973a: 195). In
the realm of painting Foucault listed Goya, Delacroix and Gericault, but
did not mention David, although I believe that he too belongs in this group.
In literature, he mentioned Baudelaire, Holderlin and, of course, Nietzsche.
9 Foucault’s most protracted engagement with Hobbes was in his lecture
from 4 February 1976; see Foucault, 2003: 89–111.
10 Foucault examined the role that equality played in Hobbes’ account of the
natural state of war, in Foucault, 2003: 90–1.
11 For Hobbes’ description of vanity and the violence engendered by this
passion, see 1962: 99. Leo Strauss demonstrated at length how the compe-
tition that occured in Hobbes’ state of nature expanded into a life-and-
death struggle in the presence of this uncontrolled appetite, or passion, of
vanity; see Strauss, 1952: 6–29.
12 There are other passions besides the fear of death that lead people out of
the state of nature, and these may be grouped together as the desire for
convenience, or ‘commodious living’, to use Hobbes’ term. I have written
about these passions elsewhere; see Tierney, 1993: 174–5, 179–80.
13 I think Strauss was justified in emphasizing the centrality of death in
Hobbes’ understanding of the transition from the state of nature to civil
society; for Hobbes claimed that since mortal conflict is always a threat-
ening possibility in the state of nature, the ‘continual fear, and danger of
violent death’ is the ‘worst of all’ the incommodities of the natural state of
war (1962: 100).
14 In the 16th century Calvin recognized the emergence of Christian subjects
of the sort Hobbes envisioned, but found it strange that ‘many who boast
of being Christians, instead of thus longing for death, are so afraid of it
that they tremble at the very mention of it as a thing ominous and dreadful’
(1845: II, 290).
15 Several scholars have identified earlier appearances of suicide; see
MacDonald and Murphy, 1990: 145–6, including note 3 on p. 145;
Alvarez, 1990: 68; and Noon, 1978: 372.
634
16 I discuss the shifting relationship between self-preservation and self-
ownership in Tierney, 1999.
17 That Hobbes was not personally opposed to suicide is also indicated in
a letter he wrote to the physician Guy Patin, indicating that he would
rather die than repeat the experience of passing kidney stones; see Stoffell,
1991: 28.
18 See Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act (1995), Oregon Revised Statutes,
127.800–127.995; for criteria for rational suicide, see Werth and Cobia,
1995: 231–40.
19 I make such an argument in Tierney, 1997: 71–2. Also see Salem, 1999:
30–6; and Prado, 2003: 207–10.
20 Although this emphasis on the thought of death as a spur to a more delib-
erate, reflective life is related to Heidegger’s claims about the existential
experience of death and authentic existence in Being and Time, there is an
important difference that separates Foucault’s and Heidegger’s positions.
For Heidegger, it was the impossibility of experiencing one’s own death,
and the thought of death as the impossibility of any being-in-the-world
whatsoever, which evoked a mood of anxiety that goaded individuals to
live a more deliberate, authentic form of existence (see Heidegger, 1962:
secs 50–3: 293–311). On the other hand, Foucault, at least in ‘The Simplest
of Pleasures’, claimed that one ought to envision and imagine one’s death
in its specificity.
21 The issue of finitude was a dominant theme in Foucault’s early publications.
Aside from its centrality in The Birth of the Clinic, finitude also figured
prominently in The Order of Things (1966[1973b]), where Foucault
characterized the modern project of turning the fundamental limitations of
human existence – life, language and labor – into the specialized fields of
biology, linguistics and economics, as an ‘analytic of finitude’ (1973b:
312–18).
22 In his frequently misinterpreted, or rather, malignly interpreted, essay ‘Is
There a Duty to Die?’, John Hardwig expressed a stance toward suicide
that is somewhat similar to that of the woman from Cea; see Hardwig,
1997.
23 Opponents of the right to die rely on the fear of a premature death that is
similar to the fear that animated Hobbes’ political theory, except that the
premature death these opponents fear is not a violent death at the hands
of another in a state of nature, but rather a peaceful, painless death imposed
too early on the aged and infirm by medical authority within advanced
cultures. Elsewhere I have contrasted this quasi-Hobbesian fear that informs
much of the opposition to the right to die, with the quasi-Heideggerian
‘anxiety’ about being kept alive in a state of obliviousness that motivates
many supporters of the right to die; see Tierney, 1997: 73.
PSC
635
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Thomas F.

Abstract Liberal articulations of the right to die generally focus on

PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 32 no 5 • pp. 601–638

Of the many bio-ethical dilemmas that have appeared on the moral

Death, medicine and bio-power

In the mid-1970s Foucault underwent something of a crisis regarding

Foucault’s dismissal of Hobbes

One might expect that early-modern political theory would play an

From Foucault’s perspective, therefore, Hobbes was at best a classical

Bio-power and the Hobbesian subject

In Hobbes’ well-known state of nature, individuals were constantly at

Hobbes’ personal behavior in regard to his health, as well as his

Hobbes and the 17th-century suicide debate

In general, attitudes toward suicide in early-modern Europe were shaped

Beyond outlawing the conscious taking of one’s own life, which he

In a 1983 interview that was published in English as ‘Social Security’,

There is an obviously important difference between thinking about

Although there certainly is room to challenge Foucault’s claims about

Without doubt, many contemporary arguments for the right to die

Over the course of his career Foucault revealed that modernity is

The College of Wooster, Wooster, OH, USA

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