Writing, Body, and Destiny: Reflections on Life and Death

Dedicated to Pippo Fiorito

Every sensitive soul perceives, at least once, this tension : the word that is not enough, the language that breaks, and the need for a gesture that goes beyond writing. Literature, in these cases, is no longer an ornament, but an act of truth . A text as a performative gesture .
The story of Édouard Levé , who delivers his manuscript to the publisher and takes his own life ten days later, presents us with a radical paradox: writing is no longer merely representation, but becomes a performative act . The book is not an external object , but coincides with the author's very gesture , with his final decision. In this sense, the text becomes unsurpassable : not because it is perfect, but because it is inseparable from the life and death that generated it.

The text as an unsurpassable gesture

Among performative texts, Édouard Levé's Suicide is unsurpassed. Not because it is a masterpiece in the canonical sense, but because it is inseparable from the act that generated it: ten days after delivering the manuscript to the publisher, Édouard Levé took his own life. Writing thus becomes an existential act , no longer representation but fulfillment. Each word is charged with a weight that exceeds literature, transforming the book into a radical document of truth.

Life and death as intertwined perspectives

Levé 's story forces us to look at life and death not as opposites, but as intertwined perspectives . Death is not only an end, but also the completion of a journey; life is not only duration, but also a tension toward a limit.

Every sensitive soul experiences this dialectic : the awareness that life is fragile , that every gesture can be final, and that this very fragility gives value to the time we are granted . Death, far from being merely a negation, becomes the mirror that restores meaning to life.

The writing of Édouard Levé , delivered shortly before his suicide, is an extreme example of this dialectic: the book is both a testimony of life and a sign of death, a word that remains and a gesture that is interrupted .

The skin as the place of truth

The fragment emphasizes living " in one's own skin ." It's a powerful image: the skin is the boundary between the inside and the outside, between the soul and the world. It's there that one feels pain, shame, joy, and memory.

Every sensitive soul bears the traces of its own history on its skin : visible and invisible scars, signs of difference, imprints of experiences. The skin is the seat of truth, because it doesn't lie: it shows what has been experienced, even when words fail to express it.

In this sense, the skin becomes the true performative text : living writing, which tells of life and death without the need for alphabets .

The dignity of fragility

The fragment on Édouard Levé invites us to recognize the dignity of fragility . Sensitive life is made up of crises, bodily details, broken words. Death is not a taboo, but a prospect that accompanies every gesture.

Every soul that feels intensely knows that truth lies not in perfection, but in the ability to embrace one's own vulnerability. Writing, the body, the skin: these are the places where this truth manifests itself.

Ultimately, what remains insurmountable is not the extreme gesture, but the possibility of transforming fragility into bond, crisis into openness, death into a mirror of life.

The Cruel Symmetry of Édouard Levé

In Autoportrait , Édouard Levé mentions the death of a friend from his adolescence who, at 25, shot himself in the head . Suicide recounts the life of that friend and everything his death awakens: a world lost and rediscovered in the recesses of memory and obsession. But if initially the story seems to construct a living portrait of that friend, through feelings and thoughts, it soon becomes impossible not to think that it is Levé himself speaking of himself and his own possible death. An event he brings to fruition through his own efforts a few days after submitting the manuscript of Suicide to his publisher.

Without a doubt, this is the book that established Levé as a writer in his own right, a book destined to endure. We are faced with an unclassifiable novel that leaves the mind in a dimension where what is speculated Levé 's life and work are frightening in their symmetry, their purity, their roundness, and their samurai cruelty. Not since Mishima has there been such a definitive commitment to making life and death an experience as closely coupled to the work as the two halves of a rhombus or the two faces of Janus .

Like Mishima , Levé conceives writing as a total gesture , inseparable from life and death . His work is "clean" and "round" because it leaves no margins : each fragment finds fulfillment in the final gesture. The metaphor of the " two faces of Janus " or the " two halves of a fish " expresses the perfect fusion between existence and art, between word and destiny. In this sense, Suicide is not just a novel, but a philosophical act : a text that questions the possibility of giving coherence to life through death , and that transforms literature into a field of radical truth .

Yukio Mishima and Édouard Levé are two figures who transformed their lives and deaths into artistic gestures, making their work inseparable from their existence. Both embodied writing as a performative act, where the boundary between art and destiny dissolves.

Yukio Mishima (1925–1970)

Born in Tokyo as Kimitake Hiraoka, Yukio Mishima was a writer, playwright, poet, actor and director . He is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century . Among his most famous texts are Confessions of a Mask (1949) , an autobiographical novel that explores identity and desire; The Golden Pavilion (1956) , inspired by a true event; and the tetralogy The Sea of ​​Fertility (1969–1971) , considered his masterpiece. The tetralogy unfolds in a Japan characterised by both an ancestral culture and an invasive modernity and preludes that dramatic November 25, 1970 when Mishima, having written the last words of the tetralogy, committed suicide with the ancient ritual of seppuku. Mishima cultivated a cult of beauty, discipline and death. His writing combined stylistic refinement and symbolism , with a strong tension between eros and thanatos . On November 25, 1970 , after an attempted symbolic insurrection , he committed seppuku (ritual samurai suicide) at a military base in Tokyo . This act was interpreted as a protest against modernity and as the aesthetic fulfillment of his work.

Édouard Levé (1965–2007)

French writer, photographer and painter , Levé was known for his conceptual research and the fusion of visual arts and literature. His main works: Œuvres (2002) : catalogue of over 500 imaginary works, a reflection on art as an idea. Autoportrait (2005) : self-portrait in impersonal sentences, dissolving identity into fragments. Suicidio (2008) : novel in the second person, dedicated to a friend who committed suicide , but perceived as a veiled self-portrait . Levé took his own life a few days after delivering the manuscript. His writing is fragmentary, impersonal, marked by the crisis of language and identity . Conceptual photography and prose are mirrored in the tension between presence and absence, life and death. Like Mishima , Levé made his death inseparable from his work, transforming Suicidio into a performative text that coincides with the author's fate .

The symmetry between life and work, which in Mishima is fulfilled in the ritual of seppuku and in Levé in the silence of suicide, shows us how death can become not only an end, but an aesthetic fulfillment. Two gestures distant in space and time, yet united by the same radicality: making writing and art a place where life is consumed and transfigured.

Mishima embodies tradition, Levé modernity ; the former entrusts his truth to the blade, the latter to the broken word. But both leave us a legacy that cannot be read without trembling: the work as a shrine, the page as skin, death as a mirror of life .
Ultimately, what remains is not the extreme gesture, but the question they leave us: can art contain the totality of existence? The answer is never definitive, but is renewed every time a sensitive soul recognizes itself in fragility, and finds its destiny in writing—or in silence.