The Suicidal State

Abstract

The Suicidal State theorizes a biopolitics of suicide by mapping the entwinement between the Progressive Era discourse of “race suicide” and period representations of literary suicide. Like the present-day white nationalist discourse of “replacement theory,” race suicide frames white Americans’ low birth rate as a sign of their imminent extinction caused by over-fertile immigrants. Casting willful nonreproduction as racial self-killing, race suicide played a fundamental role in the transformation of racial and sexual taxonomies, consolidating the US biopolitical state. While race suicide thus endowed the populational subject—the “race”—with suicidal subjectivity, Progressive Era literature gave birth to a microgenre of literary suicides, including works by Henry James, Kate Chopin, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, and a series of Madame Butterfly texts. The Suicidal State reads these suicides as literalizing the fear of race suicide as they articulate queer deathways that betray the nation’s reproductive imperative. In examining suicide’s aspiration to sidestep the biopolitical imperative to live and reproduce, The Suicidal State examines the ways in which the suicidal undoing of the self reconfigures agency, subjectivity, and intimacies with its attempt to elude biopower’s discipline of the individual and its management of the population. Through tracking queer potentialities of suicide, The Suicidal State offers a new account of sex and race, of the relation between the individual and the collective, and of the formation of a biopolitical state that Foucault calls a “racist State, a murderous State, and a suicidal State.”