Abstract
The present study aims to depicture the motive of suicide in the thought of Gabriel Marcel, while taking into consideration the general role it plays in his work. The main reason for choosing this approach is the fact that Gabriel Marcel dealt with the issue of suicide continuously in various contexts.
The goal of this text is hence to harvest these different contexts and attempt to present a whole-like form of this motive. As a starting point, we will reconstruct author's conception of relation between a subject and its body as a basis, on which the suicide is being committed; in the second step we will follow up with a presentation of despair or hopelessness as an impulse for the act itself; thirdly we will stress the case of sacrifice as an act in which the suicide can be contemplated and endorsed, even if in this form it becomes something radically different from suicide.
The principal sources are author's essays and lecture texts from the first half of 20th century, which allows an outlook of the often underrated philosophical influence of the author on then contemporary intellectual environment in France.