I intend this phrase "failure of community" in a political sense.58 I am arguing that we become part of the human community (and thus legible as human) through being named, through "being called." This means that being alive in the specifically human sense and being in community are terrifyingly linked—firstly, because there is no guarantee that we will be called at all, and, secondly, because there is no guarantee that the mode of address will not prove unlivable (cf. Butler 2004). This is terrifying because the stakes are so high, and there does not seem to be a bureaucratic way of proceeding that can ensure that no one is excluded from community. In fact, bureaucratic modes of proceeding often lead in the other direction—to the formation of collectivities devoid of biography and, thus, devoid of human life in the Arendtian sense. Community, then, depends on our terrifying ability to call on each other and, thus, to bring human life into existence. The particular violence of bare life, then, is that one conceives life as artificially severed from community, from the call, and from death and our desire for the death of others—as if life were not always linked to community through the dead. I am suggesting here that the Inuit life of-the-name provides an image of what Agamben describes as "a life in which it is never possible to isolate something such as naked life" (2000:2-3). For, as I say above, in the Inuit case, life becomes less about a single body—hungry, destitute, lacking—and more about bodies linked through the circulation of names.59 Among the Inuit, one is literally called into community by being called a name. This focus on "being-called"— rather than on a static identity—has important implications. First, the call can always be contested or reinterpreted. And, in fact, in Inuit communities, one is forever engaged in interpreting the meaning of the name one is called and the way it links one to others. Thus, what precisely it means to be called "Ittuq," or "Isaac," for example, is always in question and something people continually reflect on and wonder about...Second, because the name indexes different people at different times and can always be used again in the future, the community it creates is never fixed. Community thus inheres in the potential to be called—and to be called again. Recognizing that bare life cannot be mourned, that mourning and a relationship to the dead is in some sense constitutive of community, and that a community thus always has an indeterminate character changes the stakes of intervention.

Lisa Stevenson

Clinical and public health interventions for Indigenous suicide take place within a narrative disjuncture in which suicidality is identified as both a symptom of 19th and 20th-century colonialism (Lawson-Te Aho & Liu, 2010), and subject to treatment through welfare colonial means (Paine).

Lisa Stevenson