A Death of One's Own

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ISBN 978-0-8101-3677-9E-book – $34.95
ISBN 978-0-8101-3678-6Paper Text – $34.95
ISBN 978-0-8101-3676-2A Death of One's Own
More than a survey or work of advocacy, A Death of One’s Own examines the consequences and limits of the three reasons most often cited for supporting a person’s right to die: that it is justified as an expression of personal autonomy or self-ownership; that it constitutes an act of self-authorship, of “choosing a final chapter” in one’s life; and that it enables what has come to be called “death with dignity.” Probing the intersections of law and literature, Stark interweaves close discussion of major legal, political, and philosophical arguments with revealing readings of literary and testimonial texts by writers including Balzac, Melville, Benjamin, and Améry.
A thought-provoking work that will be of interest to those concerned with law and humanities, biomedical ethics, cultural history, and human rights, A Death of One’s Own opens new and suggestive paths for thinking about the history of modern death as well as the unsettled future of the right to die.
"This important work places the enigmatic appeal for the right to die at the center of contemporary human experience, raising questions about the nature of autonomy, integrity, and dignity—and more generally about the very nature of the human—as they are defined around this urgent and unsettling address. Engaging concrete legal cases and arguments, Stark rethinks central philosophical questions concerning death, life and ethical responsibility in what he calls the 'time of postnatural death.' At the heart of his analysis is ultimately a literary sensibility, displayed in stunning readings of literary and critical texts, that preserves the radical indecipherability of the appeal to die, freeing it from established meanings and allowing for a new thinking of decision and a new dignity 'about which one can only be silent.'" —Cathy Caruth, author of Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History and Literature in the Ashes of History