Abstract
The inspiration I take from J. M. Coetzee's book Elizabeth Costello (2003) is his advocacy of imagining as an alternative to rational thought. Imagining, as I understand him, is mindwork that engages the body as an experiential and metaphorical site. I apply this notion of imagining to suicides conducted in the service of political protest: The fatal hunger strike of ten prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1981 and Jan Palach's self‐immolation in Prague in 1969. Three questions direct the exploration of their trajectories: What feeds the hope for the effectiveness of protest suicides? How do they use the body as a performance site? Do such suicides call for an ethics of attentiveness?
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