Ekstravagantna samoubojstva? Slike starenja, patnje i odluka o okončanju života

The paper centers on the overexposed practice of (assisted) suicide in documentary filmmaking and public media broadcasting, i.e. on suffering and what it communicates visually in the context of assisted voluntary death. The main argument is that visually and publicly communicated images of agony aim to do something: to mobilize spectators in order to achieve goals of social and political change. By defending their own rights - to present themselves while speaking in first person (instead of being re-presented by others) and to have themselves observed even at the moment of their actual death – the suffering subjects invite post-mortem the global community of onlookers to act. Acting here means inviting spectators to engage in defending their rights publicly, including the right to die by having its current status reconsidered, especially in contexts where assisted suicide is still illegal and impermissible. With this argument in mind, addressing the end-of-life decision making is here theoretically framed by the ethics of images and “displays of suffering as formative phenomena of our experience of the visual world” (Gronstad and Gustafsson, Ethics and Images of Pain, Routledge 2012: xv). The overall aim is to highlight the role of a spectator in this context while having the issue reconsidered not through so-called ethics of killing (McMahan 2002) but rather through “the ethical phenomenology of images of agony” and the dilemma to-look-or-not-to-look?