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Abstract
This article examines the political practice of protest by self-burning. Focussing on Mohammed Bouazizi's self-burning in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in 2010, I explore the intellectual background for, and implications of, conceptualising such acts as ‘self-sacrifices’ or ‘self-immolations’. I argue that the use of the concept of sacrifice to define the politics of the act, given the difficulties in determining intentionality, is to focus only on its retrospective interpretation or semiotic capture. The result is that the self-annihilating subject is bypassed altogether, and his or her distinctively suicidal politicality is ignored. I argue that these subjects do not occupy political space due to a myth-making appeal to transcendence, heroic urge to sovereignty or assumed desire for community. Rather, drawing on Walter Benjamin, I argue that in such acts we bear witness to the shattering of sovereign order by a reminder to a politically constitutive excess.
EXTRACTO - Este artículo examina la práctica política de protestar quemándose a sí mismo. Enfocándonos en la quema propia de Mohammed Bouazizi en la ciudad tunecina de Sidi Bouzid en 2010, se exploran sus antecedentes intelectuales e implicaciones, conceptualizando dichos actos como “auto sacrificios” o “auto inmolaciones”. Se argumenta que la utilización del concepto de sacrificio para definir las políticas del acto, dadas las dificultades de determinar intencionalidad, es concentrarse únicamente en su interpretación retrospectiva o captura semiótica. El resultado es que los sujetos que se auto aniquilan son dejados de lado como un todo y su suicidio político es ignorado. Se argumenta que estos sujetos no ocupan espacio político debido al atractivo de trascendencia de la fabricación de mitos, la urgencia heroica de soberanía o el supuesto deseo de comunidad. Por el contrario, basándose en Walter Benjamin, se argumenta que en tales actos soportamos testimonio del colapso del orden soberano mediante un recordatorio de un exceso políticamente constitutivo.
Notes
1 This has resonances with what Foucault (Citation1984) referred to as the ‘blackmail of enlightenment’ in his seminal What is enlightenment, referring to the insistence that one must either be for or against the modern rationalist project.
2 As Bauman (Citation1992) has noted, it is perhaps constitutive to any true ethic, qua responsibility to an-other, that it cannot stop at the borders of one's life.
3 Like the Russian anarchist group Narodnaya Volya, whose preferred method, a hand-thrown bomb, required such intimacy as to almost guarantee death or capture.
4 Recent translations of diaries of individual Kamikaze, however, suggest we are prone to gross oversimplification in this context (see Onuki-Tierney, Citation2002).
5 Exact figures are difficult to ascertain given the Chinese state's actions to limit information flow from the region.
6 See, for example, Time Magazine, Person of the Year 2011. http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102139,00.html.
7 The relationship between his international effects and his now opaque intentions suggests something more akin to a natural process. Indeed, the omnipresent rendition of Bouazizi's self-immolation as a ‘spark’ or ‘trigger’ for the following international conflagrations implies precisely a role that is broadly incidental or accidental in quality (see, e.g. Bolt, Citation2012, p. xxii; Howard & Hussein, Citation2011, p. 43; Jacobson, Citation2011; Roy & Merlini, Citation2012, p. vii; Schraeder & Redissi, Citation2011). As a consequence, authors seek to excavate the ‘real’ or ‘sovereign’ causes of these events: socio-economic stress, combined with a youth-heavy population, extremely high food costs, extended economic mismanagement, the rising authoritarianism of the Tunisian regime, and the undisguised rentierism of Ben Ali and his family revealed by Wikileaks (Bolt, Citation2012; Schraeder & Redissi, Citation2011). More broadly, the Arab Spring is deemed to have been brewed in the alienation of Arab populations from their governments, and the lack of legitimate channels for voicing grievance. In the context of these ‘true’ contextual causes, Bouazizi's self-immolation is understood simply as the ‘straw which broke the camel's back’.
8 This is true even where ‘suicide notes’, martyrdom videos or the like are prepared in advance.
9
The act of abnegation implicit in every sacrifice, by recalling frequently to the consciousness of the individual the presence of collective forces, in fact sustains their ideal existence. These expiations and general purifications, communions and sacralisations of groups, these creations of the spirits of the cities give—or renew periodically for the community, represented by its gods—that character, good, strong, grave, and terrible, which is one of the essential traits of any social entity. Moreover, individuals find their own advantage in this same act. They confer upon each other, upon themselves, and upon those things they hold dear, the whole strength of society. (Hubert & Mauss, Citation1964, p. 102)
10 It is precisely through interpretation of these acts that national selfhood was constructed or sustained in the face of Soviet repression. We see, therefore, in Uehling's (Citation2000) rendition of the Tatar poetic and narrative re-articulations of self-immolation, the classical terms of political theology. The phrase ‘homeland or death’ became closely linked to the act as the slogan for opposition to the Soviet forces, and the idea of victory through sacrifice takes centre stage in the narrative of national struggle: ‘the emblem of their suffering, invoked as both example and ideal'. Self-immolation here is clearly a form of sacrificial myth-making, imagining political being and sustaining it in the face of threats to collective being.
11 The concept of sacrifice implies that what is ‘political’ in this context is a denial of death, through its replacement by a higher communal life. Self-sacrifice, like nationalist self-sacrifice or Christian martyrdom, is thus essentially a rationalised politics of self-deception. The promise of an afterlife offers consolidatory valence in secularised form, through membership of the transcendent community. An explanatory discourse which views such acts as political because they are transcendentalising obviates the very possibility of a self-destructive politics: since the desire for death is really a desire for immortality instituted in the sovereignty of the continuing narrative community. Politics simply is the desire to counter-death with a secure and stable (i.e. immortal) territoriality: precluding political commitments which reach all the way to self-abolition whilst remaining political seems highly problematic if the object of study is political self-destruction. The claim that politics is against death is classically articulated by Hannah Arendt, who, as Kateb (Citation1987) has noted, smuggles in precisely this paradoxical obviation of political morbidity.
12 As Fierke (Citation2013, p. 6) puts it: ‘The word political points to the objective of the sacrifice, which is the restoration of political community.'
13 This attention to the circulation of emotion is intended to demonstrate the influence of post-modernism on Fierke's account.
14 Contrasting with counter-conduct accounts following Foucault, which assume the continuous re-imbrications of formations of resistance with formations of power.
15 This is what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari refer to as ‘Molar desiring-politics', which assumes the construction of identitarian wholes, that may be opposed to other wholes through a binary inside–outside logic, and which thereby operates under the logic of sovereignty (see Deleuze & Guattari, Citation2004a, Citation2004b).
16 ‘Ritualisation is a strategic way of acting in specific social circumstances’ (Fierke, Citation2013, p. 43).
17 After all, a community that has lost sovereignty has ‘lost many traditional means of stabilisation’ (Fierke, Citation2013, p. 99).
18 Palach's suicide note read:
Because our nations are on the brink of despair we have decided to express our protest and wake up the people of this land. Our group is composed of volunteers who are willing to burn themselves for our cause. It was my honour to draw lot number one and thus I acquired the privilege of writing the first letter and starting as the first torch. Our demands are 1) immediate elimination of censorship, 2) prohibition of the distribution of Zpravy. If our demands are not fulfilled within five days by January the 21 1969, and if the people do not support us through a strike of indefinite duration, more torches will burn. Remember August. In international politics a place was made for Czechoslovakia. Let us use it. Torch Number One. (Treptow, Citation1992)
19 The term coined by the Russian anarchists for the practices discussed here.
20 Thus the reliance on teleology in most theories of revolutionary spontaneity.
21 For example, Jihadist's dismay in response to Al Zakarwi's campaign of suicide-bombings in Iraq.
22 ‘Various forms of sacrifice are conducive to particular outcomes' (Fierke, Citation2013, p. 98).
23 Fierke's Polish example does not appear to be a case of self-sacrifice, but rather the post-facto martyrdom of a priest murdered by an authoritarian state.
24 As Fierke (Citation2013, p. 227) recognises: the hunger strikes were followed by ‘a bloody escalation of tit-for-tat violence'.
25 Which again Fierke recognises: in Vietnam as in Northern Ireland ‘further war was the consequence’ of acts of self-annihilation (Citation2013, p. 190).
26 Imaginary forms explain sacrifice and sacrifice creates imaginary forms.
27 For Girard (Citation2005, p. 23), the juridical system is ‘infinitely more effective' in containing violence than the sacrificial system.
Additional information
Dr. Nicholas Michelsen was awarded his undergraduate degree in International Relations and Philosophy by the University of Sussex, and holds an MA in International Conflict Studies and an MRes in War Studies from King's College London. His doctoral thesis, written in the Department of War Studies, dealt with the politics of suicide, with particular reference to the international practice of suicide-bombing.