Suicide is a threat. It hopes to take hostages.

Of the Donatists, Augustine reports: “If they cannot devastate us by slaughtering us, then they believe that they can terrify us by dying themselves. Their goal is either their own joy at our deaths, or else our sorrow at their deaths.”[1]

In “Attempted Suicide in Adolescence,” Jack Novick studies “the critical psychopathology … derived from the incapacity to achieve adolescent separation from their mothers,” and the descent into suicide due to the “resultant morbid attempt to master the developmental problem.”

In their commentary on the essay, Maltsberger and Goldblatt see this connection as pertaining “to many adults in their twenties and thirties who suffer from chronic suicidal character pathology, of which a singular aspect is the tendency to make the therapist responsible for whether the patient lives or dies.”[2]

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[1] Augustine, Letter 204.
[2] Novick, “Attempted Suicide in Adolescence,” in Essential Papers.

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Of course we know that human being is already often bracketed. It is called living and some would say true living under the sign of death swinging just overhead. To bracket life by bringing death into play is to feel alive, they say. To bracket life is truly to thrive and not merely to survive like or as a mere animal, a brute, a beastly beast. This is called defying death and there are actuarials and awards and final scenes in movies for just this kind of bracketing based on which way the wave breaks.

And of course we bracket the lives of other humans by bringing their deaths into play in service of our own hungers. This is time honored as the diabetic dance of the Bagel and choreographed since time immemorial arranged in variations on the very same scenes and movements. This bracketing often means wincing and it produces whipped dogs alternately starved and fed by a master. It is the foundation for society and species built on bracketing, where the slave is complicit in that they have hungers too and just want to survive and reproduce despite the whippings.

And we know that human life itself in its completeness is bracketed. Human life is bracketed by ashes, preys a common prayer commonly prayed, and life human is bracketed by dust, except of course that human beings bracketed almost always hunger to bracket death by more and better life after death. The wish for a double bracketing, you might say, unless of course until death after life after death after life outbrackets life after death. A triple-bracketing for the win, says death itself, perhaps as merely the first bracketing all along.