Ian Marsh. Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 264 pp. $US 34.99 paper (978-0-521-13001-1), $US 95.00 hardcover (978-0-521-11254-3)
Ian Marsh’s Suicide: Foucault, History and Truth chronicles the process through which suicide, similar to motherhood, became pathological at the hands of the ‘psy’ disciplines, psychiatry in particular. Here too, hormonal imbalances and mental illness are often seen as the main culprit. Marsh’s Suicide, written in the style of a “history of the present,” begins with “mapping a contemporary ‘regime of truth’ in relation to suicide,” where the author examines how a “compulsory ontology of pathology” is produced and reproduced in professional accounts of suicide, how authority is established, objects and subjects defined, and truths disseminated. … Read more
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