At Last, A INVENÇÃO DO SUICÍDIO, 2026, Editora UFABC (free PDF)

View original imageOn A invenção do suicídio, published by Editora UFABC, which offers a genealogy of voluntary death, a critique of psychiatry and a philosophical reconfiguration of the problem of suicide.

The book is available as a free PDF download here: A invenção do Suicídio 

The print edition will launch in Florianópolis on 17 November 2026 at the 21st National Meeting of Anpof

As far as I can tell in retrospect, I came to the problem of suicide through a kind of necessary shift in my thinking. It had not been the subject of my research. My early inquiry, first developed in Vita (published in Belo Horizonte in 2007), began with a different question: What is death? In that first book I sought to defend a thesis that already struck me then as counterintuitive enough: death should be understood as the death of consciousness, rather than as the opposite of life in general. When we consider the body, what we find is a continuous succession of transformations: matter is taken up into new cycles of life. Death becomes a problem in the strict sense only within the horizon of consciousness. That is where, and only where, we can properly speak of death. Vita naturally examines the implications and limits of the thesis itself, with the attention to forms of expression, the aesthetic understanding of existence and related matters that characterized my studies at the time.

This conceptual shift, however, left open a field that, in retrospect, has proved decisive: voluntary death. It was only years later, in 2015, on the banks of the São Francisco River at the Federal University of the São Francisco Valley's campus in Juazeiro, Bahia, that the question emerged more clearly. I was teaching a short course on Augustine and the problem of voluntary death in his monumental A Cidade de Deus, under the auspices of Krisis — the Critical Anthropology Laboratory. I encountered a large audience and an intellectual demand that went well beyond the scope of the course.

It was there that I realized I would have to do more than revisit a problem and broaden it to encompass self-inflicted death. An entire field of inquiry needed reorganizing. Three lines of work grew out of that experience, still in embryonic form in 2015, and would guide my studies in the years that followed.

The first was pedagogical. I saw a need for a sustained space for reflection, with a continuity that scattered lectures and occasional interventions could hardly provide. This led to a course called Preleções sobre o suicídio, later added to the Social Sciences degree programme to which I belonged (and now taught at UFPel). From 2018 to 2022 I devoted myself to designing and developing those classes, writing the lectures with a view to giving them a life beyond their oral delivery. It is this work, at once teaching and research, that forms the core of this book. In this sense, A invenção do suicídio is the direct result of those lectures, which matured over years of teaching and research.

The second line was historiographical. Since the late 1990s, when I was still an undergraduate studying philosophy at UFMG, the concrete experience of loss had made the problem of suicide impossible to avoid. Year after year close friends and fellow students were gone, and we could make no sense of it. I still lacked the conceptual tools to account for the historicity of suicide. When I took a careful look at George Minois's História do Suicídio, I was deeply disappointed. Information, particular cases and analyses of journalistic sources predominated, and the literature it drew on did not lead to the development of knowledge in the strict sense. It was this shortcoming relative to my own aims (the book remains valuable and makes for enjoyable reading) that led me to undertake a História do suicídio of my own. The first volume was published in 2020, and I have continued working on subsequent volumes ever since. Some of the questions raised in Book 1 of my História do Suicídio, especially in its opening chapters, are examined more closely in this new book, although I have since taken them further still.

The third line, more strictly philosophical in nature, led to a dissertation on the central place of Augustine of Hippo in the history of suicide, which I wrote between 2021 and 2025 in the Graduate Programme in Philosophy at UFRGS. In that work, entitled As confissões de Lucrécia: Agostinho e a anatropia da morte de si, I sought to show how the Christian tradition goes beyond condemning voluntary death. It redefines its conditions of possibility by placing it within an economy of guilt and interiority. The book is currently under review by the press of the Federal University of Minas Gerais. I will share news as the publisher's schedule allows.

A Invenção do Suicídio is situated where these pedagogical, historiographical and philosophical concerns meet. The book sets out to dismantle the apparent self-evidence of the concept and offer a critique of the current state of the field. It does not put forward a theory of suicide. I deliberately work within a tradition of critique and seek to show how what we take as given, suicide, arose through a historical process of moral, theological and legal, linguistic and scientific codification.

The book's guiding question, which readers will encounter in its opening pages, only looks simple: when did voluntary death become suicide? The question seeks to understand a process, not to identify a date or isolate an inaugural moment. It assumes there was a time when what we call suicide today was understood neither under that name nor under that regime of judgment. I believe that experiencing these other perspectives is essential both to subjecting our own time to critique, that is, to analysis, and to broadening our understanding of how we judge self-inflicted death.

It is worth pointing out here that this problem does not arise in isolation in this book. I had already worked through an initial formulation in the first chapters of the first volume of my História do suicídio (2020), published by what was then Editora Páginas and is now Literíssima. What was still an interpretive outline there receives the fuller treatment it needs here. The book has a different aim from As confissões de Lucrécia, which is entirely devoted to examining Augustine's position and takes the research further.

Let me briefly explain what readers will find in this book, which is appearing now after a long period of gestation. The first essay, pointedly entitled A invenção do suicídio: como a morte voluntária se tornou assassinato de si, is the core of the inquiry. I argue there that the word suicidium was more than a late lexical invention. It was a decisive conceptual operation. Bringing sui and caedere together produced a normative equivalence: killing oneself came to be understood as a special form of homicidium, and thus to be regarded and classified as a crime. The word's defining move is to characterize an act and pass judgment on it, going well beyond naming it.

This transformation took its most systematic form in Augustine. In his treatment of the famous case of Lucretia recounted by Livy, Augustine made an interpretive move that, in my view, marks a turning point in the history of voluntary death. He rejected the exemplary standing of Lucretia's tragic and noble act, traditionally celebrated as a matter of honour, and shifted the grounds for its evaluation from outward circumstances to inward intention. With that shift, voluntary death became culpable in every case.

The operation goes deeper than it might seem. It changes the structure of experience itself, going beyond the condemnation of an act or omission leading to death. As Christian interiority became the privileged site of judgment, it redefined the subject as absolutely responsible for his or her own life, and consequently for his or her own death. This is the sense in which I call suicide an invention: voluntary death existed before, but now it came to exist under a specific regime of truth and guilt.

The book goes beyond this inaugural moment. Throughout its essays I seek to show how this invention changes, shifts and takes on new configurations. One of the most important changes occurred in the modern era with the emergence of psychiatry.

In the ninth essay, on the psychiatric question, I return to the debates of nineteenth-century French alienists, particularly Philippe Pinel, Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol and Bourdin. It was in these debates that suicide came to be systematically associated with madness, often in the form of monomania. Though apparently obsolete, this notion has proved surprisingly persistent. An uncomfortable question runs through the chapter: when we talk about “suicidal behaviour” today, are we reviving the same operation under new terminology? Diagnostic classification, by identifying suicide as a symptom, has an ambiguous effect. It allows intervention while neutralizing the existential dimension of the act.

It is precisely this neutralization that the book challenges. The existence of psychological suffering is beyond dispute. What I reject is its reduction to a single model of intelligibility. Making suicide into an illness risks eliminating what is most disturbing about it: its relationship to freedom, meaning and decision. The tension is especially clear when we set psychiatric discourse alongside existential approaches such as those of Viktor Frankl and Jean Améry. Both attempt to restore to the subject a dimension that eludes clinical practice: the relationship to the meaning of life and to the possibility of ending it.

The book's first move, then, is genealogical: it shows how suicide was constructed. Its second is critical: it shows how that construction continues to operate, often invisibly, in contemporary discourse. At this point the discussion opens onto the present. In the tenth essay I examine World Health Organization documents and prevention campaigns to bring into view a new form of normativity, one presented in the language of public health. Suicide then becomes a problem to solve, a variable to reduce and an indicator to control.

What is lost when we gain the ability to manage? That question guides this part of the book and remains, perhaps, one of the most urgent of our time.

***

Although the inquiry thus far has been genealogical and critical, a point comes in the book when it is necessary to reconstruct what has been taken apart. This move is clearest in the second essay, on the relationship between freedom and belonging.

The modern tradition has grown accustomed to thinking of freedom as autonomy, the subject's ability to determine itself independently of any ties. This conception, deeply rooted in our philosophical and legal vocabulary, underpins many contemporary accounts of suicide, especially those that place it within what is known as the “argument from freedom.” In returning to ancient sources, particularly the Greek term eleutheron in the Homeric poems, I seek to show that freedom and autonomy were identified with each other only at a much later stage. In its oldest sense, freedom signifies belonging: to an order, a community, a world.

This shift is more than philological. It has decisive consequences for the way we think about voluntary death. If freedom means belonging, then the classical opposition between the “argument from freedom” and the “argument from belonging” turns out to be largely misconceived. The task is to understand how both poles emerged from the same conceptual matrix, which came to be split in two over time. Greek tragedy is indispensable here. In the third essay, examining figures such as Antigone, Jocasta and Ajax, I seek to show that modern categories cannot account for voluntary death in the ancient world. It is neither a straightforward expression of autonomy nor mere submission to an external order. It takes place in a field of tensions in which fate, the gods, honour and community are intertwined.

The death of Ajax, for example, cannot be reduced to an individual decision in the modern sense. It arises from an irreconcilable conflict between recognition and dishonour, between belonging and exclusion. Antigone likewise does more than choose to die. She acts within a logic that exceeds the opposition between law and conscience, revealing the complexity of a world in which life and death do not belong wholly to the subject. By placing these figures at the centre of the analysis, I seek both to reconstruct a distant past and to shift our perspective on the present. Contemporary readers accustomed to thinking of suicide in terms of individual choice or pathology encounter an experience to which these categories do not immediately apply.

This shift deepens as we examine the classical philosophical tradition, particularly Plato and Aristotle. “Did Socrates die voluntarily?” is a philosophical problem in this context, with a reach far beyond historical curiosity. It forces us to rethink the relationship between freedom, law and death, showing that voluntary death can take forms that elude condemnation and celebration alike.

Perhaps the most decisive moment in this inquiry comes when the book turns to the problem of the concept. In the seventh essay I take up the question directly: what is suicide? The question seems simple and quickly proves intractable. Available definitions oscillate between extensional and intensional criteria, between attempts to delimit the phenomenon and efforts to explain it. Yet the greater the precision we seek, the more evident the instability of the concept becomes. At this point I propose distinguishing between definition and concept. A definition seeks to fix a set of characteristics, whereas a concept operates as a field of forces, bringing heterogeneous practices, discourses and judgments together under a single term. Suicide, in this sense, is a construction that brings together legal, moral, medical and existential dimensions.

This multiplicity makes any attempt at a totalizing explanation especially problematic. To ask “is it possible to explain suicide?” is ultimately to ask whether its complexity can be reduced to a single principle. My answer throughout the essay is deliberately sceptical. I reject reduction while leaving open the possibility of understanding. This refusal echoes one of the principles I draw on in the eleventh essay: the principle of the identity of indiscernibles. If no two subjects are absolutely identical, then no two voluntary deaths can be absolutely equivalent. Every case brings with it a singularity that resists generalization.

At this point the book draws close to an existential perspective. We need to ask what suicide means to the person contemplating it, alongside asking what it is. This shift in focus from concept to experience places the continuing need for conceptual analysis within a wider horizon.

Throughout these essays, readers will notice how the question of freedom keeps returning in a variety of forms. It appears in tragedy, in classical philosophy, in modernity and in the contemporary world. It takes a distinct form in each case, requiring close attention to its transformations. What I ultimately seek to show is that thinking about suicide requires us to rethink freedom. And rethinking freedom might require giving up some of our most deeply rooted certainties.

This movement from genealogy to reconstruction and from critique to proposal prepares the ground for the book's final discussions. There the problem of voluntary death is confronted again in the light of contemporary questions concerning bioethics, psychiatry and the meaning of existence.

***

Where the earlier essays sought to reconstruct the historical and conceptual conditions of suicide, the book's closing sections shift the problem onto still more unstable ground. Here voluntary death is confronted directly with the categories of value, meaning and decision.

In this context, a dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche is unavoidable. In the eighth essay, examining the idea of “dying at the right time,” I explore one of modern philosophy's most disconcerting provocations: the idea that voluntary death may, under certain circumstances, be a rational act. In opposition to the tradition that condemns suicide as error or sin, Nietzsche introduces the possibility of thinking of it as an affirmation of a particular form of life, as distinct from life in general.

This position should not be simplified. Nietzsche shifts the terms of the discussion rather than celebrating voluntary death. By setting voluntary death against involuntary death, the death that befalls us without our choosing it, he reopens a question that both the Christian tradition and modern psychiatry have sought to close: the relationship between freedom and death.

What is at stake here is a critique of the naturalization of death. If we accept without question the death that nature imposes on us, why do we reject in advance a death that might, at least in principle, be a matter of decision? Once again, this asymmetry brings a moral construction into view where we might have thought the problem purely natural.

The tension returns in another guise in bioethics. In the thirteenth essay, examining the contributions of Fritz Jahr and Hans Jonas, I seek to show how contemporary thinking about life and death is still shot through with fundamental ambiguities. In proposing what is known as the “bioethical imperative,” Jahr extended the field of ethics beyond the human to encompass all forms of life. Jonas, in developing an ethics of responsibility, emphasized the need to preserve life in the face of technological threats. Both were decisive in shaping contemporary bioethics, and both also reveal its limits.

The question I seek to raise is this: to what extent does bioethics, by emphasizing the preservation of life, reproduce in new forms the same logic that historically condemned voluntary death? When we make life the supreme value, do we risk depriving ourselves of the possibility of interrogating it? The problem becomes especially acute in the case of euthanasia. In discussing autonomy within bioethics, I seek to show how appeals to autonomy often mask an impoverished understanding of freedom. The opposition between autonomy and belonging thus returns without any questioning of the very concept of life at stake.

Perhaps the most critical issue in these final essays, however, is the relationship between suicide, technology and the contemporary world. We live at a time when life is increasingly managed: monitored, quantified, prolonged. Voluntary death presents a scandal in this context, both moral and technical. It escapes mechanisms of control, resists prediction and defies administration.

This is where the critique of prevention policies becomes sharper. In examining contemporary strategies for addressing suicide, I seek to show that many of them begin by reducing the phenomenon to a technical problem. We speak of prevention, intervention and treatment. Although necessary in certain contexts, these terms tend to obscure the specifically philosophical dimension of the issue. The idea that suicide must be prevented at all costs presupposes that it is always a mistake, an aberration or a failure. That seldom articulated assumption is precisely what the book seeks to call into question. It examines the assumptions behind public policy while recognizing the importance of such policy. Far from leading to an indifferent relativism, this critique calls for even closer attention to the singularity of experience. It is here, as the book draws to a close, that it approaches a more explicitly existential perspective.

The afterword takes the form of a letter on William James and brings a change of tone. Following the historical and conceptual inquiry of the essays, it introduces a more direct dimension, closer to lived experience. James's attention to the varieties of religious experience and the problem of meaning offers a counterpoint to the rigidity of normative discourses. In dialogue with him, I explore a question that runs quietly through the book: what makes a life go on being lived... or cease to be? This question admits no general answer. It points to a dimension where concept and experience meet without ever fully coinciding.

Perhaps this is where the book finds its limit... and its strength. In refusing moral condemnation and totalizing explanation alike, it remains on unstable ground, where every claim must be continually re-examined. If there is a conclusion to be drawn, then, it takes the form of an attitude rather than a thesis: the willingness to hold the problem open without reducing it. In an age that demands quick answers, this suspension may seem insufficient. It may, however, be what makes more rigorous thinking possible.

The same attitude guides how the book circulates. It is available in full under Open Access through Editora UFABC. The decision follows from a conviction about how a work of this kind should circulate: its reach should be guided by free access rather than by profit. Any reader should be able to consult it, question it and, if so moved, challenge its arguments. At the same time, I recognize that the physical book still matters to the experience of reading. A print edition will therefore be available soon and will launch at Anpof in Florianópolis in November. To make this edition more affordable, I chose to forgo royalties, as stipulated in my contract with the publisher. For a 508-page book with significant production costs, that choice makes it possible to reduce the final price substantially.

I have tried here to bring form and content into agreement. A book that calls into question the capture of life by mechanisms of normativity could not wholly submit to the logic of the market without contradicting itself. Making it accessible is an integral part of the project. If this work aims to intervene in the contemporary debate at all, it does so consciously by opening a field of questions. Suicide as we know it is a historical construction. Recognizing this leaves the problem open, but may at last allow us to begin thinking outside categories that can, after all, be subjected to critique, displaced and reconstructed.