Suicide contagion is a real phenomenon. The stigmatization of suicide attempters, completers, survivors of suicide loss, and the idea of suicide itself is at least partly to blame for these outbreaks. Regarding suicide as an analyst, journalist, witness, responder, or bereaved family member or friend can be a devastating form of metaphorical and literal looking. Through a psychoanalytic understanding of constitutive rhetoric, this dissertation offers a textualized way of considering the difficult process of giving individuals who have completed suicide ones regard. Beyond just suicide, this rhetoric of regard presents the disconstituent as the lost persona that withdraws from identification practices. In so doing, this work offers a methodology which articulates the painting technique known as the vanishing point through the Lacanian subject positions of the Imaginary, Symbolic, and Real. This dissertation argues that identification can be understood as a demand for a false confession of a subject that does not really exist through Kenneth Burkes notion of the negative and self-abnegation. The disconstituent is the persona lost to and by the subjective practices of identification. Disconstitutive rhetoric is the false confession and interrogation that creates the state of disconstituency which resides within the regarded disconstituent. This dissertation concludes by arguing for an ambivalent regard which mirrors the disconstituent withdrawal while still allowing for the one regarding to feel for the regarded.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-07132015-101053 |
| Date | 16 July 2015 |
| Creators | Womelsdorf, Charles Stowers |
| Contributors | Grey, Stephanie Houston, Saas, William, Edwards, Renee, Bach, Jacqueline |
| Publisher | LSU |
| Source Sets | Louisiana State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-07132015-101053/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached herein a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to LSU or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below and in appropriate University policies, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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