Suicide via the Other

Suicide via the Other names a specific logic of self-annihilation that Zupančič excavates from Kant's ethical texts, distinguishing it sharply from a sacrificial logic of suicide that would merely reinforce the big Other by offering it a gift of suffering or martyrdom. In this second, more structurally radical form, the subject does not sacrifice itself for the Other but rather attacks the very symbolic coordinates—identity, status, support, meaning—that the Other supplies. The subject is not simply destroyed; what is annihilated is the symbolic scaffolding that made the subject legible as a subject in the first place. The act therefore dissolves the very frame through which subjectivity is constituted, making it a kind of implosion of the symbolic order from within. Zupančič's key move is to show that this logic satisfies all the formal criteria of a pure ethical act in the Lacanian sense: it is non-pathological (motivated by no empirical interest or goods), unconditional, and indifferent to survival and social recognition.

The concept's paradox is that by meeting those formal conditions, suicide via the Other becomes the perverted double of the genuine Act—structurally indistinguishable from it, yet oriented toward annihilation rather than transformation. It is therefore positioned as the dangerous limit-case or dark underside of Lacanian ethics: the point where an act that looks maximally pure is actually a destruction of the symbolic qua symbolic. The phrase "it is as if the state commits suicide" captures the idea that the state—here standing in for the big Other as institutional embodiment—is not overcome from outside but collapses through the very logic it had sustained.

The concept appears in Zupančič's alenka-zupancic-ethics-of-the-real-kant-and-lacan-2000 (p. 96), situated within her sustained argument that Kant's moral philosophy contains resources—and dangers—that anticipate and illuminate Lacanian ethics. Against the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, which holds that the only genuine moral failure is betraying one's desire, suicide via the Other represents an act that is formally faultless—it does not yield to the service of goods, it does not compromise—yet produces not fidelity but annihilation. It is thus a critical specification of the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, marking the outer limit beyond which formal purity becomes self-defeating. Zupančič uses the concept to show that not every act structurally resembling the pure ethical act is one; the formal criteria are necessary but not sufficient.

The concept also bears a close, productive tension with Perversion. Like the pervert, the subject performing suicide via the Other relates to the symbolic order not by desiring within it but by positioning itself as instrument—here, as the instrument of the Other's annihilation rather than its completion. Where the pervert shores up the law by becoming the object of the Other's jouissance (a◇$), suicide via the Other inverts this further: it neither sustains desire nor completes the Other, but collapses the very symbolic field that Fantasy ordinarily stabilizes. Fantasy, recall, is the transcendental frame giving reality ontological consistency; suicide via the Other is precisely what happens when that frame is targeted for destruction rather than traversed. The concept thus sits at the intersection of Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Perversion, and Fantasy, functioning as the negative, limit-case that throws each of those canonical concepts into sharper relief.

Ethics of the Real: Kant and LacanAlenka Zupančič · 2000 (p.96)

We annihilate that which - in the Other, in the symbolic order - gave our being identity, status, support and meaning ... it is as if the state commits suicide.

The phrase "in the Other, in the symbolic order" is theoretically loaded because it specifies that what is annihilated is not the empirical subject but the symbolic coordinates—"identity, status, support and meaning"—that the Other provides, making this a destruction of the very structure that constitutes subjectivity; and the appositive "it is as if the state commits suicide" then performs a chiastic reversal, showing that when the subject destroys its symbolic ground, it is the big Other (the state as its institutional embodiment) that is the real casualty.