Durkheim's scenography of suicide

Durkheim's classic study Suicide still has many surprises and mysteries over 100 years after it was written: why was the order of analysis reversed in this study? Why did Durkheim have recourse to theory? Why did the study require dramatizations of its 'individual forms'? This paper tries to answer these questions with reference to Durkheim's failure to find a link between the way individual suicides are committed and social causation. This simple and unexpected finding suggested to Durkheim that analysis of suicide rates was more complex than he had anticipated. Because he could not establish a continuous causal chain via the means employed to commit suicide, he looked elsewhere and claimed to have established it in the emotional character of the act itself. This led him to a highly speculative construction of a set of ideal typical scenographies of suicide to save his conception of expressive causation, rather than restructure his theory of suicide to meet the complexity he had found, and particularly his conclusion that 'the form of death chosen is... something entirely foreign to the very nature of suicide'.