Abstract
Abstract Recognized in the twentieth and twenty-first-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 crisis, 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 irreparable acts of self-annihilation, which stand in dire contrast to contemporary practices of self-care, vitalist intensity and self-enhancement?
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