A Review of 4 Dada Suicides Part Two – An Editor of Do Not Submit
November 22, 2025
Part Two: Jacques Rigaut
“Perhaps we are now in the midst of the beyond, an uncomfortable beyond where the suicides of other worlds are interned for a certain time.” -M. Clément Vautel
“The weapon aimed at life by suicide is always right. No rubble nor ruin shall be left standing after the will which burns and destroys everything has passed by. But such an act leaves the strength of whoever has committed it intact. The regret at having been born and the need to die vanishes with the world they have killed. Alone, absolutely alone and pure, the self-centered thought contemplates and recognizes itself. Jaques Rigaut lived under this shadow of perfect resemblance.” -Paul Éluard
Jacques Rigaut was born posthumous. An exemplar of Dadaist nihilism who haunted the margins of 20th century Surrealism, Rigaut was not a poet or provocateur, but a “general agent of suicide.” He declared at age 19 that he would live only until 30, and on November 9, 1929, just shy of his 31st birthday, fulfilled his prophesy:
After paying minute attention to his toilette, and carrying out all the necessary external adjustments demanded of such a departure- calmly shot himself through the heart…
One shot. Clean. Measured with a ruler. Executed with tailor grace. A perfect gentleman adjusting the knot of his tie. The smile of a man who has already departed his body. In a world of bad faith only the completed act is honest. Rigaut’s contempt rings clairvoyant, the hauntology of the avant-garde.
Of people who commit suicide, some do themselves violence, and others, on the contrary, let themselves go and seem to obey some fatal curbing of their destiny…
The self-proclaimed “general agent of suicide” was the absence of any gravitational force, a yawning indifference that stripped life of its illusions.
Despair, indifference, betrayal, fidelity, solitude, the family, freedom, weight, money, poverty, love, absence of love, syphilis, health, sleep, insomnia, desire, impotence, platitudes, art, honesty, dishonor, mediocrity, intelligence-nothing there to make a fuss about…
His fragments adorned surrealist anthologies, a visual automatisme of disorientation. Theatrical and joyless futility. A dance with evasion. “I subtract myself until the equation is immaculate.” There is nothing to make a fuss about. Rejecting narrative for the convulsive beauty of negation. Yet he hints at a hidden, sustaining void.
The pagan believes in nature as it shows itself the Christian in the reverse that sustains it.
Far from a devout occultist, Rigaut viewed the occult as an intimate, personal void, a mirror to the unseen forces that both inspire and devour. At its core, Rigaut’s occultism was thanatotic, a devotion to death as the great enigma. He romanticized suicide as a hermetic rite, transforming personal annihilation into cosmic commentary.
You are all poets and I’m on the side of death.
Rigaut’s contempt for life positions himself as a dark initiate, yet his occult leanings remained idiosyncratic and untheorized. His was a negative esotericism, born of war trauma and ennui, his words still invoking occult-tinged musings.
An occult part of the male experience is toiling in secrecy creating something that will bring about your destruction.
He reminds us that for some initiates, the true mystery lies in not summoning spirits, but in becoming one.
Suicide is an act whose gesture occurs in one world and whose consequences are in another.
The void manifests as exhaustive enumeration, a litany of life’s banalities that collapses under its own weight, revealing not tragedy but tedium. Nothing to make a fuss about. Death is a charitable donation.