A Death of One's Own

A Death of One's Own, by Jared Stark, is a challenging intervention, from a comparative literature scholar, in legal and bioethical debates about the so-called “right to die.” Though clearly based in relevant bioethical scholarship, it is highly resistant to being assimilated within the existing frameworks in which euthanasia is discussed. This resistance is on purpose, for it is only by unsettling these frameworks that a robust understanding of the issue might be had. The result generates more questions than answers. But, for Stark, that is the nature of his subject matter: modern death.For Stark, modernity is characterized by conflicting impulses toward death. On the one hand, there is the desire to control it. Such control comes primarily through its medicalization: from the shift of death from the home to the hospital, its cordoning off from the growing metropolis. But this control is always limited, because modern death is itself constitutively uncontrollable. This is, in Stark's view, “the enigma” of modern death: “its unrecognizability and its resistance to assimilation to existing categories" (13).This duality—between control and resistance—is characteristic, in Stark's view, of the right to die. The right to die is, for Stark, emblematic of the particularly modern moment when death becomes a matter not of nature but of individual choice. This foregrounds the question of suicide. “What does it mean,” he asks, “to think of suicide as a way to die, and, conversely, to think of death as a form of suicide?” (11). Modernity is when suicide comes to define death.But the question of suicide, in modernity, itself is a generator of questions. Is it an instance of self-control? Or one that illustrates the extent to which the self is controlled by coercive social forces? Is it an act of freedom, or oppression, or disease? Stark does not give a definitive answer to any of these questions. Rather, he seeks to maintain the tension inherent in their asking. His goal, in this sense, is not to resolve existing conversations about the “right to die.” Rather, it is to highlight, in part, how the very desire for resolution underpinning such conversations comes to limit them. Such limitations are not just betrayals of the subject matter. They have personal and political stakes.Though A Death of One's Own is well organized, it is, by Stark's own account, not a “thematic study.” Rather he seeks to consider “three overlapping but distinct arguments that commonly serve as the basis for claims to the right to die” (5). Each of the book's central chapters addresses one of these claims. Chapter 1 examines the idea that the right to die is an exercise of “personal autonomy.” Chapter 2 considers whether it is a moment of “self-authorship” on the part of the individual who seeks assistance in dying. And chapter 3 examines the functioning, within the right to die debate of the concept of “death with dignity.”Within each of these chapters, Stark follows a method that is simple, powerful, and—for future scholars—replicable. In each, he begins with a contemporary debate, within bioethics, centering around the chapter's central concept. He works through the internal logic of this debate, showing how a relatively stable understanding of these concepts underpins the range of acceptable bioethical views. He then illustrates how the relative stability of these concepts is in fact somewhat illusory. They are fields of contradiction, undermining the very ideals they purport to represent, and leading both proponents and opponents of the right to die to understate potential harms—and limit potential benefits.In short, he blows the debate open. Then, having done so, her turns to literature. He enacts close readings, in each chapter, of texts that do not have anything explicitly to do with the “right to die” as currently formulated in bioethics. Indeed, the texts he analyzes—Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Balzac's Peau de Chagrin, and Jean Amery's On Suicide—largely predate the emergence of bioethics itself. Nevertheless, they do illustrate, as Stark shows, the concepts that structure the debates we have today. Thus, in a way, Stark uses literature to vividly illustrate the contradictions that he staged in his immanent analysis.But he goes further. Through his reading of literary texts, Stark provides the means to reconstruct these central concepts in ways that, if not more “consistent,” more richly embody the contradictions inherent to modern death itself. Though he does not generally apply these reworked concepts to the contemporary debates—at least not to the extent that they could be easily implemented by bioethicists today—he provides ample inspiration for future scholars to do so. The result is a compelling model for how literary studies can contribute to bioethics—and how bioethics, in turn, might integrate a richer understanding of literary studies into its interdisciplinary repertoire.My only critique of the book is that Stark does not extend his approach far enough. In reality, the right to die was not simply—and is not—about conceiving of death as a form of suicide. It limits suicide to a particular population: people with incurable medical conditions, a category that, depending on jurisdiction, could include chronic illnesses and disabilities, as well as terminal illnesses.This limitation itself raises questions: Is this giving these populations “more freedom” or rather denying them the basic suicide prevention that we give to any other group? And underpinning the justifications of this limitation, there are a series of contradictory claims about the relationship between incurable medical conditions and various forms of both pain and suffering.Such claims could be richly explored through Stark's method. But, though he does at times address them—most notably through an engagement with the work of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson—they appear somewhat peripheral to his concerns. They are not, however, peripheral to contemporary debates in bioethics; indeed, in these debate the relationship between the right to die and disability violence has emerged as central. Stark's decision to not engage this relationship more fully thus somewhat limits the applicability of his book.But this limitation is easily remediable, and this book provides a series of compelling models for future engagement. This engagement will in turn have to grapple with the manner in which Stark has analyzed the central concepts that he considers here

Art · Political science · Right to die · Ethics in medical practice · History · Law · Philosophy · Political Philosophy and Ethics