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Here is another romantic reflection on the death of Amy Winehouse, this one going back to the source of our knowlege on suicide, Emile Durkheim. Again, it is something with which even your basic bottom-feeder loser can identify, that sense of not being grounded in the living world, as the days and years waft by in a mist of dream and sorrow, in a way that I imagine is more true than of millionaire entertainers.
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Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, in his great work, “Suicide,” published at the end of the 19th century, drew attention to the phenomenon of “anomie.” Society is held together and sustained, he argued, by a network of norms — largely unstated rules of behavior. Suicides, he argued, tend to suffer from anomie, or normlessness: they float free from the life-belt of rules and regulations, and often sink.
Durkheim characterized “romantic anomie”, in particular as an “infinity of dreams” doomed to be forever in conflict with the reality principle, and potentially fatal.
-- Andy Martin at The New York Times
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Emile Durkheim, the founding father of sociology, in his great work, “Suicide,” published at the end of the 19th century, drew attention to the phenomenon of “anomie.” Society is held together and sustained, he argued, by a network of norms — largely unstated rules of behavior. Suicides, he argued, tend to suffer from anomie, or normlessness: they float free from the life-belt of rules and regulations, and often sink.
Durkheim characterized “romantic anomie”, in particular as an “infinity of dreams” doomed to be forever in conflict with the reality principle, and potentially fatal.
-- Andy Martin at The New York Times
