The Transindividual Act of Self-Burning

Abstract

Recognized in the 20th- and 21st-century history of political suicides as a radical act of protest and a spectacular expression of an intense experience of suffering, self-burning has returned since 2010 when Mohamed Bouazizi's act sparked protests in Tunisia. Its last wave in Europe includes those cases of self-incinerations in which the conditions for their political performativity are only partly fulfilled: the acts are public and communicate with the antagonist in the symbolic places of power, but their motivations aren't explicitly formulated as political. When self-annihilation is triggered by the basic needs and rights to maintain life - such as unemployment, housing crises, conflicts at work and other forms of precarity - means and ends with respect to life become indistinguishable. How can life be weaponized as a transindividual form of dissent if self-destruction also brings an end to desperation and suffering of the person? How are we to attend to irreperable acts of self-annihilation, which stand in dire contrast to contemporary practices of self-care, vitalist intensity and self-enhancement?

Notes

1 I would like to thank friends and colleagues for their comments on the working versions of this article: Austin Gross, Stefan Govaart, Jordan Skinner, Corin Ward, Bojana Kunst, Robin Vanbesien and Jack Cox.

2 Prominent examples include self-burnings against the US-led war in Vietnam in the United States (1965–9); the self-burnings of Ryszard Siwiec, Jan Palach and others against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (1969–70); self-burnings of Kurds in Turkey (since 1982); self-burnings in various provinces in India fighting for statehood (2010–20); and self-burnings of 157 Buddhist monks in Tibet against Chinese state repression since 2011.

3 See www.etymonline.com/word/immolate, accessed on 2 February 2021. In a broader sense, self-immolation includes other forms of self-mutilation that symbolize self-sacrifice.

4 It must be mentioned that Bouazizi’s act resonated in social media thanks to his cousin’s actions. Ziółkowski reports that Ali Bouazizi magically ‘appeared outside the magistrate building moments before the suicide protest and later recorded footage of the incident with his phone. Then, he collected photos of Mohamed engulfed in flames from other witnesses and packaged them for online distribution. He was perfectly aware of the power of this particular medium, believing, in his own words, that “images are like weapons, they can help topple a regime”.’ He deliberately meddled in portraying Mohamed as an unemployed university graduate in order to help the class of young, educated Tunisians in rebellion to identify with him (Ziółkowski 2020: 254).

5 Apart from Louvradoux, the seven cases include: E. C. working for the French energy company GDF; Lise Bonnafous, high-school maths teacher; Joseph Kebaha, searching for social housing; Manuel Gongora, sanitation worker of Grand Lyon; Jean-Louis Cuscussa, pleading for his case to the Caisse des Allocations Familiales (CAF) (a French government body that offers benefits and services to families); and Djamal Chaar, pleading for his case at Pôle emploi (a government agency for unemployment).

6 Article 1 of United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948 states: ‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.’ While the whole document emphasizes the notions of equality and freedom in the Western modern tradition after the French Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, it doesn’t properly define ‘dignity’, but connects it loosely to ‘brotherhood’, as if solidarity arises from respecting the dignity of everyone. https://bit.ly/3gYtrEm