Dying as a Way of Life
The right to die as a prominent contemporary social movement is seen to originate as a response to concerns about biomedical interventions prolonging life at all costs. However, assisted dying is simultaneously a biomedical intervention reliant on biomedical technologies and based on a language of biomedical technique. Although right to die activists often use this language when making their arguments, paying close attention to the voices of right to die advocates allows a nuanced approach attenuated to the multifaceted and contradictory aspects of experience. The way they speak about death reveals underlying concerns closer to Heideggerian notions of « art » and continuities with earlier conceptions of an « art of dying ». By embracing death’s inevitability, or living in a way of being-towards-death, activists are often much more concerned with the art of living and dying than they are with biomedical technique.