Crypts, manuscripts

Abstract

In this essay, the author looks at that singular meeting of handwriting and death: the suicide note. It is odd for him to speak, here, in the first person singular, as if in superior juxtaposition with those whose last words were also written with the particular voice of an ‘I’, but one which was soon to disappear. And yet he could not, for the life of him, not use the first person when speaking of the death of him, seeing as how the Latin sui in ‘suicide’ posits him here already, present and accounted for – for now. He is not here looking at the suicide note ‘a little coldly’ or ‘dispassionately’ as Simon Critchley attempts in his recent monograph Notes on Suicide, to whose work he shall occasionally be returning; personally, with his very person always-already implicated in suicide, he does not seek to ‘lay things to rest in writing’.