Abstract:

The usefulness and limitations of dignity as a guide to clinical end-of-life decision-making lie in the challenge it poses to the bioethical principle of autonomy, individualist self-determination that can resist others’ expectations. I propose understanding dignity as performative and thus mutual rather than autonomous, requiring witnesses and a feedback loop of representation, reception, and reinterpretation that, crucially, persists after the death of the central subject in order to establish the meaning of a death as either “dignified” or “horrible.” Taking Erving Goffman’s theatrical model of self-presentation as an invitation to apply to dying the criteria of dramatic genre and the rules of decorum prescribed by the genres of tragedy and horror, I use the representation of assisted suicide in the 2019 film Midsommar, and that film’s foregrounding of the face, to develop an account of dignity as the witnessing and reading of a communal and embodied performance of self-governance in the face of dissolution.

摘要：

尊严作为临床临终决策指南的有用性和局限性在于它对自主、个人主义自决的生物伦理原则构成的挑战，可以抵制他人的期望。我建议将尊严理解为表演性的，因此是相互的而不是自主的，需要见证人和一个代表、接受和重新解释的反馈循环，至关重要的是，在中心主体死后仍然存在，以便将死亡的含义确定为“有尊严的”或“可怕的”。以欧文·戈夫曼的自我呈现戏剧模型为邀请，将戏剧体裁的标准和悲剧和恐怖体裁规定的礼仪规则应用于死亡，我在 2019 年电影《仲夏夜》中使用了辅助自杀的表现形式，以及那部电影的面部前景，以发展尊严作为见证和阅读面对解体时自治的集体和具体表现。