15.12.2014, 19.00 at the fridge & xaspel
Sofia, 8 Madrid blvd.

“An economic suicide” – what is that? This peculiar social phenomenon has been haunting Europe since around the year 2008. It has become an ongoing landmark of the Eurozone financial crisis or the European sovereign debt crisis characterized by two related though not identical phenomena: the economic recession and the economic austerity regime, the latter being “imposed by the troika of the European Union, International Monetary Fund and European Central Bank” (Stuckler and McKee, 2012). Moreover, numerous studies about the 2008 recession and its public health consequences have been accompanied in 2012 by the European Parliaments’ alarming statements promoting “the detrimental effects of the economic crisis on the mental health of European citizens”. It is true that such views could be (partially) explained in relation to the rise of citizens’ unemployment, impoverishment and general dispossession. However, the current trend of “increased suicidality amid economic crisis” (Economou et al., 2011) puts forward one pressing claim: that “every 1% increase in unemployment correlates to a 0.8% rise in suicides” (European Parliament 2012): this has led public health experts to conclude that “Europe is facing a mental health crisis” (European Parliament 2012). Thus, my question: Is Europe mentally ill? Given this framework, I argue that so-called economic suicides do not exist: what exists instead is the politico-juridical system of ongoing death-production through which it becomes possible to examine the current neoliberal matrix of necropower - and the political pseudo-suicides committed on behalf of it.

Marko Stamenkovic (1977, Vranje) is art historian and curator born and raised in the south of Serbia. He graduated in Art History from the University of Belgrade (2003) and received his M.A. degree in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies from the University of Arts in Belgrade (2005). In 2014 he earned his doctoral degree in Philosophy from the University of Ghent (Belgium) with the thesis “Suicide Cultures. Theories and Practices of Radical Withdrawal”. His PhD research was realized at the Department of Philosophy and Moral Sciences under Prof. Dr. Tom Claes (CEVI-Center for Ethics and Value Inquiry), supported by Basileus Scholarship, an Erasmus Mundus Action 2 project for academic exchange between EU and Western Balkans funded by the European Commission.

http://www.curators-network.eu/database/db_item/id/810

https://ugent.academia.edu/MarkoStamenkovic