Suicide and careers of the disqualified man: a dynamic apprehension of Durkheim’s egoistic suicide based on farmers’ cas

The common representations associated with the suicides of farmers highlight the figure of the lonely man facing economic difficulties. Farmers would therefore be a privileged case study to analyze egoistic suicide, defined by Durkheim as one stemming from a lack of integration. Nevertheless, this idea is considered as poorly operationalised because it can be seen as a static representation due to the lack of data on suicide. Based on a qualitative investigation of farmers’ trajectories of suicides, this article demonstrates that egoistic suicide can be conceptualized in a dynamic perspective as the result of a life through which the individual is disqualified from all the social scenes they might like to participate in.