Suicide is usually discussed through prohibition, diagnosis or grief: as an act to condemn, prevent or explain after the fact.

Simon Critchley begins somewhere more difficult. He asks what suicide means to the person contemplating it, and whether it is possible to think seriously about the desire to die without immediately sealing the question beneath moral judgement or therapeutic reassurance.

Moving through philosophy, literature, historical suicide notes and his own experience, Critchley examines suicide as an existential problem: the peculiar human capacity to step outside life imaginatively and judge whether it should continue. The essay is neither an argument for suicide nor a disguised memoir of recovery. Its subject is the blockage around the subject itself—the social panic, embarrassed language and compulsory optimism that often make honest thought impossible. The volume also includes David Hume’s suppressed eighteenth-century essay “Of Suicide.”

The work belongs to the tradition of philosophical writing that treats thought as something with consequences rather than a decorative intellectual exercise. This revised edition includes Critchley’s later reflections on how the discussion of suicide has shifted, particularly under the conditions of social media. 

Fitzcarraldo Editions, third revised edition, 2025. Paperback with French flaps; very light handling wear, otherwise clean and near fine.