International Journal on Criminology Volume 4, Number 2, Winter 2016 | Page 63

Know What You Are Fighting
bear witness, to bring forth an otherwise unspeakable truth about him- or herself. For
example: “I don’t accept it, even if I can’t get rid of it! You won’t get me, despite your
power!”
This message is addressed to someone close, like a real or symbolic father:
to the family, to friends, to society, in a psychological process of transposition by
projection. The image of power, of the state, becomes the target, with the transference
of aggressive feelings coming from the similarity between real and symbolic power.
The suicidal act ensures a psychological function of a reparative, punitive (of the
other or oneself), or vindictive “ordeal.”
The criminogenic masses suggest to the suicide candidate that the only way
out, the only escape, is suicide, the unspeakable to be saved is often connected to
the couple dignity-humiliation. Even guilt, a powerful motor of processes of selfdepreciation,
sees the dignity acting there as a reparative process.
Acting on the environment by attacking one’s own life: this is how “Being”
in its various attributions and manifestations imposes itself on common, social, and
moral values. “Being” does not mean only living in the biological sense; blowing
oneself up also expresses this “Being”: a way of existing beyond the dominant reason
by defying it. Candidates for suicide attacks are not desperate, but on the contrary,
tragic actors, motivated by the conviction that their deadly sacrifice will support their
cause.
Differences Between the Two Forms of Suicide
Criminal suicide, or “suicide attack,” since other people are victims, differs in
many ways from suicide that does not harm others. In a suicide attack, the candidate
suffers external pressures through indoctrination that reinforce a preexisting suicidal
tendency and facilitate the passage into action. Physically inoffensive for others, the
aim for a solitary suicide is psychological offense. While there are pressures, they are
unconscious and come from the soul of the suicidal person, even if, for that person,
they come from another or others.
Self-destruction to merge with the universe is symbolic of inoffensive suicide.
In a suicide attack, the notion of destruction is patent, highly visible, and materialized
in the form of a real explosion: it is a question of negating the environment, fusing with
the other in the explosion, embracing existence by means of violent action. And while
this notion goes beyond the simplistic formula and theories on pathology, it cannot be
reduced to a nihilist theory. The concept of “nirvana,” the search for absolute peace,
omit in this case some aspects related to how language functions.
Coming back without preconceptions to the salient aspects of the phenomenon,
as phenomenology teaches us, shows that a “suicide attack” is not a detachment, a
disinterest in the positive aspects of life. Far from being a demission, suicide attacks
actively participate in the persistent status of “being there”; it confirms its power
without authorization from anyone, no matter what its power or role, father, state, or
anything that symbolizes authority.
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