Doing Death: Autonomy, Agency and Relationality

The legal possibilities of euthanasia and assisted suicide have fundamentally altered our understanding of one of the most crucial transitions of existence – the one from life to death. Having been understood previously as the “ultimate humiliation of reason and control” (Bauman), over the last years the imaginations of what constitutes a dignified death have gained additional momentum by the possibilities of choice and control over the end of life. Various countries have seen debates on euthanasia and assisted dying taking up the ideals of choice and control to combat challenges and fears associated with the latest life stages. Being able to independently decide on ending suffering, illness, or despair has sparked interest in questions of agency in death. In sociological understanding, these developments have often been described as logical continuations of the normativity of autonomous and independent agency into very old age. Similarly, critics of liberalisation attempts have warned from a wrong idealisation of autonomy and control. However, both analyses seem to be limited by its own theoretical starting point: the centrality and primacy of the autonomous individual.

Drawing on a discourse analysis of several examples from European public debates on euthanasia regulations, I investigate the underlying conceptualisations of agency and the individual subject. Rather than understanding the wish for assisted dying as emblematic for individual agency, I demonstrate the strongly relational nature of the conceptualising of this (final) transition. Using a relational ontological theoretical perspective, I explore the different ways in which old age in euthanasia policy proposals is characterised by relationality and relationships. This perspective may counterbalance a theoretically one-sided analysis that inevitably reads the debates on assisted suicide as prolongation of societal individualisation processes. Doing euthanasia is a relational process that cannot be limited to individual agency, control and autonomy.