Samomor med simptomom in metaforo
The monograph Suicide Between Symptom and Metaphor explores suicide in 20th-century Slovenia beyond medical and psychiatric frameworks, treating it as a historical, cultural, and political phenomenon. The authors show that suicide is not merely an intimate decision of the individual, but also a space where broader social tensions, ideological conflicts, and collective ideas about meaning, identity, and belonging are revealed.
Meta Remec analyzes the transitions in the understanding of suicide from sin and criminal act to social symptom and cultural marker. She focuses in particular on the turning points after both world wars, when suicide took on new meanings – from an “epidemic” of moral decay to an undesirable symptom in socialism that undermined the image of the “new man.” Ivan Smiljanić focuses on the partisan “heroic suicide,” which during the war was not only a personal decision but also the subject of political mythology and memory battles. He reveals how such acts oscillated between glorification and silence, raising ethical questions about loyalty to the collective and the limits of ideology. Marko Zajc, on the other hand, sheds light on how the metaphor of Slovenians as a “nation of suicides” became established in the second half of the 20th century. He analyzes how this idea moved from literary texts to intellectual polemics and political debates, becoming a tool for explaining social crises, cultural upheavals, and national identity. Zajc shows that the metaphor of suicide functioned as a powerful symbolic form that could be used by very different, even contradictory ideological projects.
The monograph raises fundamental questions about the ways in which society interprets painful and undesirable phenomena, and shows that suicide has become a metaphor through which Slovenians think about themselves. In doing so, it offers an original contribution to the understanding of Slovenian history, collective memory, and cultural representations of life and death, ranging from religious and moral norms to political interpretations and identity debates.