1. Against pathology

Describing the performativity of self-immolation is a critical task at a moment when much of the public discourse understands the act through the interiority of the subject, occluding both the power relation from which this mode of political resistance emerges and the movement it stirs in others. To some extent, the lack of consideration given to self-immolation as a legitimate form of resistance can be explained by the act’s lack of resemblance to other forms of political resistance that emerge from different power relations. Consider methods of collective resistance in Leftist traditions (e.g., a labor union on strike) that respond to the top-down economic structure of capitalism with a form of resistance from below. While anarchist tendencies toward sabotage or destruction may share something with self-immolation, anarchist forms of resistance (such as rioting, property destruction, or cyber attacks) are almost always performed incognito and as a response to the infrastructure rather than the regulation that takes place through the body. While self-immolation is a spectacle, it is not a spectacle like those found in forms of direct action through public demonstrations taken up by ACT UP (which also stages public death through “die-in” demonstrations), say, or civil rights demonstrations with the express aim of improving the state through expanding representation or inclusion. Finally, self-immolation is not like other forms of violent resistance that resort to a more indiscriminate form of killing, often with careful attention to scale or a metric of death. Self-immolation’s resistance forms from a particular interrelation between the individual body and collective practices for living that situates the conducted spectacle of self-destruction within and against the biopolitical matrix.

Furthermore, I contend that the misrecognition of self-immolation is due, in part, to the biopolitical tendency to produce meaning about an individual subject from embodied behaviors. Rather than view it as an emergent refusal of a normalized power relation, much of what has been written about Bushnell’s self-immolation prefers to read the act as a commentary on individual virtue or pathology, usually to either condemn or condone the actor. This focus on individual morality totally bypasses the act’s embeddedness in the social while simultaneously producing a knowledge of the social world as a collective of individuals. I want to avoid the language of heroism or martyrdom because these frameworks rely not on the performance itself but on the representation, symbolic transport, or valorization of the individual as they relate to a given group that interprets and assimilates the individual’s death into its own field of desire. Even while I might find personal affinity with some such groups myself, I am approaching Bushnell’s self-immolation as a point embedded in relations—a sort of joint—between American life and Palestinian death, a point which cannot be separated from those power relations as it articulates them.

I also want to avoid speculating on the individual’s interiority because this mode of analysis seems only to depoliticize the act. In the New Yorker’s coverage, for example, Bushnell’s act is read not as one of political refusal but as a death from political despair—the act of an individual without hope.Footnote ¹² The interpretation attributes Bushnell’s death to personal fatalism, given an unchangeable political climate. Rather than a political act embedded in social relations with the express desire to refuse those relations, Bushnell is exposed as helpless—a fragile, vulnerable subject whose personal suffering is the result of failing political institutions but whose action is ultimately depoliticized by his death. In the New York Post, his death is read as a sign of poor mental health services for military members, radical brainwashing, the glorification of suicidality, religious fanaticism, and ineffective and narcissistic demonstrations.Footnote ¹³ This mode of analysis relies on a universalist notion that a life lived is a good life and that, if life is self-selectively destroyed, it represents a problem (or many problems) within individuals who need correction or rehabilitation. What is striking is how the tendency to depoliticize Bushnell’s action issues from opposite ends of the accepted and legible political spectrum: from the liberal New Yorker and from the right-wing New York Post alike. Across that ostensible divide, the commentary converges on a single gesture, taking Bushnell’s action and his final words—“Free Palestine”—as symptomatic of his condition, be it despairing or pathological, and, in doing so, reproduces the biopolitical power relation. Neither reads the act as one with political transport, given our condition.

2. The norm and the war to be human

Suppose we do examine his stated motivations. In that case, we see that Bushnell repeatedly indicts everyday living practices in the United States for their entanglement with genocidal militarism in Gaza, an entanglement he calls “normal.” For Bushnell, what appears to be “normal” must be exposed as a discrete yet explicit social fabric that sutures authorized forms of life in the United States to authorized forms of death in Palestine. This idea of “normal” echoes a similar formulation of Foucault’s: “The norm is an interplay of differential normalities.”Footnote ¹⁴ In one sense, this norm can be thought of as a recurring matrix of relations that conceal how certain ways of life depend on the debilitation or death of other ways of life. (Consider how the accumulation of private property depends on the violent dispossession of commonly held lands and subsistence practices, ways of life often associated with indigeneity.) In another sense, the norm can be thought of as the fabrication of clear material differences between lives of human value and lives of human non-value that regulate the separation between bodies that live a day-to-day life and bodies that die a day-to-day death. (Consider how US law differentiates between the “legal” citizen with a protected right to life and the “illegal” migrant whose death in the desert or at sea, say, is treated as inevitable, even natural.) The norm is one of differential normalities in interplay.

To target the norm, then, Bushnell asks his fellow authorized subjects what they would do if they lived alongside the enslaved, the segregated, the lynched, the subjects of genocide, the “New Poor” who are forced to live “throwaway lives” as Sylvia Wynter puts it, or those whose racialized bodies are exposed to a “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore puts it.Footnote ¹⁵ Bushnell’s question brings such biopolitical relations to the fore by showing the normalized entanglement between authorized subjects of life and authorized subjects of death. As Neferti X. M. Tadiar argues, the American way of life produces this double authorization—of life and of death—through what she calls the “war to be human,” which defends the American way of life by waging war against other forms of life that then must fight for recognition as human.Footnote ¹⁶ This war to be human is waged both domestically (consider the war on drug users or “crime”) and on a global scale (consider the war on terror). Tadiar argues that “life itself has become central to [capital] production, and human, a code of valorization—a measure and instrument of economic calculus and political enfranchisement.”Footnote ¹⁷ Bushnell’s line of questioning offers a critique of the reproduction of the American way of life as a war machine that constantly stratifies human value, rendering entire populations exploitable, expendable, and disposable. His answer—“The answer is, you’re doing it. Right now”—indexes a normative interplay between practices of living that are authorized and capacitated by the category of the human and the lives incapacitated by their very exclusion from that status. With this question and answer, Bushnell exposes the brutality of practicing a “normal” life in the United States and exposes how life and death are two sides of a coin with different values—capacitation and debilitation—that circulate and reproduce an economy of global power relations. In other words, he starts his action by questioning a norm, where authorized life and authorized death modulate any possible resistance to the war to be human.

In the face of this violent project through which the American way of life sustains itself, Bushnell withdraws from life-affirming practices—be they humanist, rights-based, or routine democratic liberalism—that reproduce the appearance of distance between the genocide of Palestinians and the ordinary lives of authorized subjects lived in their wake. That distance is what Bushnell discloses and collapses. He does so not by speaking about suffering in the abstract but by putting the authorized body, the soldier’s body, into crisis publicly. Michael Biggs provides us with formal insight into the public, affective capacity of this crisis by arguing that self-immolation belongs to protest because its extremity cannot be absorbed into routines, nor can it be reduced to what Biggs calls “personal grievances.” Rather, it is attuned to a “collective cause.”Footnote ¹⁸ Biggs and I agree that the exceptional aspect of self-immolation as a refusal of day-to-day norms emerges from how it necessarily operates in excess of both routine, embodied practices and a social capacity to assimilate or tolerate such acts as something “normal.” Self-immolation overwhelms the norm, and any recuperative responses—pathologizing Bushnell as mentally unstable, brainwashed, or suicidal—only confirm rather than refute this. Each attempt to absorb the act into a discourse of individual pathology obscures the body itself—be it the image of the burning body, the choreography of the action, the specific setting in front of the Israeli Embassy, or the final words Bushnell offered. The apparatus can produce discourse about the dying body, but it cannot reproduce the dying body’s performance. It cannot confront it.

Yet, for Biggs, self-immolation is an idealistic protest that wants a new form of humanity that transcends the material realm of the collective grievances it responds to—for Biggs, the act is symbolic.Footnote ¹⁹ However, because Bushnell’s act takes place through the body, I argue that it does critical materialist work regarding embodied practices for living by orienting us toward the entanglement of everyday life and death. In this sense, the act exceeds recuperation or pathologization not because it is symbolically too powerful, but because its material specificity—the soldier’s body, the particular conduct, the precise counter-conduct—cannot be fully accounted for as a symptom without the remaining trace of a specific embodied action. It sabotages the norm’s operative schema as a unified system of representations—be they symbols or subjects—by staging the body as a site of social practice. By using the soldier’s body, I will argue, Bushnell turns the techniques of subjectivation back on themselves: the fire consumes the body that once enforced the routines of order, security, and legitimacy, exposing how those routines bind life to death, freedom to domination, and the human to its own dispossession. Bushnell’s attack on the soldier thus operates in excess of the representation of soldiery, just as it operates in excess of “the self” or the subject, by attacking the material conditions—the human body—through which representational logics measure the value of life and death under US imperialism.

3. Conduct and counter-conduct

I want to turn to Foucault’s discussion on the “ideal figure of the soldier” to explore how disciplinary power operates through a structuring of embodied practices (movements, customs, habits, and behaviors) that model and enforce the parameters and limits of what can be thought and practiced, of what is normal or what is deviant.Footnote ²⁰ Specifically in the context of disciplinary institutions (the army, the air force, the prison, the factory, the asylum, the hospital, the university, the school, etc.), the figure of the soldier emerges as both the example of obedience and the mechanism for it. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault develops this theory, starting with the exertion of disciplinary force that takes the body as its site of subjection and subjectivation when making a soldier:

For the soldier to be made, the body must perform what can be thought of as the authorized choreography of the soldier—the posture, the dress, the rhythms, the gaze, the footwork—that allows for the figure of the soldier to emerge to the surface of the body and become a legible subject to others. The purpose, as Foucault notes, is docility: the capacity to be a referent, a model subject, but also the capacity to be used, positioned, and sacrificed. To become a soldier is to internalize a bodily grammar through specific “movements, gestures, attitudes, [and] rapidity,” letting commands inhabit the flesh so fully that obedience appears natural, inherent, even honorable: “an infinitesimal power over the active body.”Footnote ²² The soldier becomes at the molecular level; this is how a docile body is made.

While the soldier may be the exemplary docile body, the procedural training of the soldier’s body both involves specific fields of knowledge and an interchangeable disciplinary and routinized method for subjectivation as a social practice. In other words, the making of a soldier is the ideal procedure for creating governable subjects through the use of numerous and diverse techniques over the body, which extend throughout the masses to control populations. This description of the biopolitical relation as a broad form of social control is related to disciplinary force, but it differs in scale: it describes how these relations work on populations as “a collection of separated individualities.”Footnote ²³ In his lecture series Security, Territory, Population, delivered at the Collège de France in 1978, Foucault described a broad yet individuating form of governing through the notion of “conduct.” When Foucault speaks of conduct, he describes a molecular process that expands on the relation between discipline and social control by showing a matrix of relations connected by bodies conducting others, bodies being conducted by others, and all bodies conducting themselves as per that conduct.Footnote ²⁴ Control is immanent to this social field of conduct, but it operates through individual internalization, distributed through the disciplinary apparatus that affects individual bodies. We can thus characterize the society of control as a concentrated yet generalized force field of conduct that internally authorizes social practices, even beyond the reach of institutions.

To expand the notion of conduct, Foucault takes up the pastorate in Western Europe—particularly in France—to historicize biopower’s evolution into a mode of “governmentality” that operates on populations through this broad matrix of conduct.Footnote ²⁵ In tracing governmentality’s emergence in the pastorate, Foucault insists that the “fundamental problem [of locating power relations] is undoubtedly not the Pope and the Emperor, but rather that mixed figure, or the two figures who in our language, and also in others, share one and the same name of minister.”Footnote ²⁶ The transfer of conduct as a method of governance from religious institutions (with clerical ministers) to government institutions (with prime ministers) is not signaling a relationship between church and state so much as it is elucidating similar methods of exercising force that focus on the self-conduct of the individual bodies that conduct other bodies to conduct populations.

Inasmuch as “conduct” describes the interplay of methods for controlling bodies at scale, resistance to conduct—counter-conduct—shares a quality of being embodied. Counter-conduct is a function of the mode of conduct that it resists, but with an aim to be conducted differently. It is a break in the flow of forces that conduct the masses by opening up the possibility of other conduct. One form of counter-conduct to the pastorate that Foucault offers is asceticism. Foucault shows how the practice of ascesis was discouraged by the growing influence of pastoral ministers. As monasteries grew in number and reach, so too did an obligation to specific forms of collective life, the “organization of a hierarchy around the abbot and subordinates,” and a “relay of power” imposed on everyone according to their rank and order.Footnote ²⁷ For Foucault, the necessity of unconditional obedience in the pastorate reveals why it was necessary to manage any behavior that could be understood as boundless control over one’s life.Footnote ²⁸ Ascesis is an act performed by the self on the self. It pushes the limits of the self through the will to self-discipline. It involves the mastery of self-conduct through the body, not through the institutional or broad social management of life, but through individual risk and suffering. Due to this self-inflicted risk and suffering, the pastor figure who practices ascesis also practices a resistance to the pastorate’s claim on conduct. Pastoral ascesis emerges as a counter-conduct that, in its self-discipline, tests the normative means of conducting life. It is a counterflow against the flow of governance, one that I will later examine through Bushnell’s self-immolation.

4. Militarism and American governmentality

For now, I will consider the conduct and counter-conduct of the figure of the American soldier generally by moving Foucault’s analysis of the pastorate and governmentality to an analysis of the military and governmentality. As a settler-colonial, capitalist state founded on stolen land through conquest and invasion, a war for independence, the institutionalized enslavement of Black bodies, and, as a contemporary imperial formation that depends upon the policing of migrancy, the condemnation of bodies to labor or death, and the exploitation of the planet, the United States emerges as a notable point where militarism and governmentality coevolve. What this move requires, however, is not simply the substitution of one institutional figure for another—the minister for the general—but a broad genealogical account of how the militant disciplinary apparatus has functioned as a governing force across the history of the United States. With limited space, I will offer some examples not so much to narrate a continuous history of war but to trace a topography of governing practices across distinct historical conditions that maintain a structural consistency: the conduct of life and the management of death in the interest of reproducing a specific social order.

Crucially, the United States does not begin before this apparatus and subsequently acquire it; rather, it is constituted by it. The settler-colonial project is, from its inception, a military-administrative project: the enclosing of Indigenous land requires not only direct violence—massacre, forced removal, and the weaponization of starvation—but a regulatory architecture simultaneously military and administrative in form, from the reservation and the pass system to the Bureau of Indian Affairs—each institution conducts Indigenous life toward disposability while enabling settler expansion.Footnote ²⁹ What would later be distinguished as “domestic governance” and “military force” are, in this originary moment, co-original; the land surveyor, the settler militia, the sheriff, the soldier, the settler, and the Indian agent inhabit the same apparatus. The plantation extended this formation. Chattel slavery is not an exception to American liberal governance but one of its primary practices: a militarized site of production that operates through surveillance, discipline, the permanent threat of lethal force, and the management of Black bodies through pass systems, patrols, and slave codes, and what amounted to the deputization of the entire white population as a distributed enforcement body.Footnote ³⁰ The slave patrol, for instance, merged military obligation with domestic racial governance at the most intimate scale of the body, regulating sleep, movement, kinship, and reproduction.Footnote ³¹ In each transformation, the mechanisms differ, and the historical conditions are distinct, but the structural tendency is consistent: the producing, sustaining, and containing of conflict becomes a medium through which governing relations conduct lives. COINTELPRO is exemplary here. In combining military intelligence techniques, psychological operations, and the criminalization of political conduct, it governs domestic dissent as an insurgency, treating Black and Indigenous radical organizations, Puerto Rican independence movements, and the anti-war left as enemy combatants within the territory of the state.Footnote ³² What follows—the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror—extends this rationality. Each successive war is an authorization of life and death, in permutation of a previous form. Each is a new iteration of governance formed through the routinized, disciplined management of crisis, which delineates who is capacitated, who is rendered vulnerable, and how violence circulates to stabilize the reproduction of the American way of life, a way of life that, in any situation, is considered both normative and virtuous.

While it follows that the production of the soldier is a primary process of subjectivation in the American mode of governmentality, it is equally important to show how the production of the American soldier and the American citizen are not merely related but also co-constitutive. This co-constitution is not a contemporary blurring of roles but a structural feature: the Second Amendment’s “well-regulated militia” names the founding subject of American democracy as the armed citizen-soldier. What the genealogy of the militant security apparatus reveals, then, is that the figure of the purely civilian subject—the unarmed, non-militarized citizen—is itself a historical production, always unstable, always requiring disciplinary maintenance. In fact, the soldier’s conduct is something made within and for the discourse of everyday American life (consider the hybrid aesthetics of ICE agents that blend plain clothes, military vests, and camouflage gear, explicitly embedding the aesthetics of governance into everyday life). Furthermore, the choreography of the soldier is also repeated by the citizen, so much so that the two figures merge, and this merger enables the citizen-soldier. Consider the juridical authorization of white supremacist vigilantes and militias: from the Ku Klux Klan—a paramilitary formation—to Kyle Rittenhouse opening fire on protesters in Kenosha in August 2020, killing two people, and being acquitted of the charges, to Travis and Gregory McMichael—a father and son who worked in policing and the armed forces—chasing down and murdering Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020.Footnote ³³ These citizen-soldiers operate under the auspices of protecting American freedoms—they implement the conduct that is required of their freedom—by brutalizing any perceived threat to their way of life. If a soldier is a body that practices suspended will, sacrifice, and a conduct that manages life and death, then any act of American paramilitary violence can be assimilated into this logic. When we consider the soldier, we are considering any docile body assembled and organized into a killing machine: the embodiment of the violent apparatus for managing life and death totally. That this body sometimes wears fatigues and sometimes wears civilian clothes is not a contradiction but a structural feature of the apparatus—one the genealogy of militant security in the United States makes legible by showing that the distinction between soldier and citizen has always been ideological rather than ontological, a line drawn and redrawn to manage the reproduction of a racial capitalist order rather than to describe two genuinely separate political subjects. What the co-constitution of soldier and citizen reveals, then, is that the body Bushnell brings to the Embassy is not only a military body. It is the exemplary body of American political subjectivity as such—the body through which the apparatus has always conducted its management of life and death, whether in fatigues or plain clothes, whether on a battlefield or a street in Kenosha.

5. Reading the livestream

At this point, we can return to our initial question, formulated differently: how does the soldier’s self-immolation resist governance? And how does that process touch the lives of many?

Before he destroys the killing machine, Bushnell’s action begins with a peculiar approach that starts to address these questions. The livestream opens with an angled shot of Bushnell’s face from below. His hair is cut to regulation length, tight to his head. His military fatigues come in and out of view as he urgently walks past amorphous brick buildings surrounded by high walls, electronic gates, control panels, surveillance cameras, security lights, flags, plaques, signs, and symbols, all gliding through the background of the frame before disappearing. We hear later on the news that these armored buildings are actually state embassies located on “International Drive” in Washington, D.C., the road that—while remaining under the jurisdiction of the United States—houses all of the embassies for which the US government offers extraterritorial sovereignty for state, bureaucratic, and diplomatic networks to operate from. We recognize the figure of the military officer here, among this spatial condensation of a governing apparatus: the administrative infrastructure, the walled compounds, the electronic thresholds, and the many distributed eyes of constant surveillance. If we trace the visual field that the livestream opens with, we see an apparatus of governmentality on our screens depicting the body of a soldier against the background of state infrastructure.

And yet, this scene of total governance contains its own disruption. Something misfires in the soldier’s performance from the outset. The air of this soldier is off: he trembles too much. We are not met eye-to-eye nor face-to-face with a representative of the state standing stationary, square to the camera, prepared to deliver a formal message to an audience, nor a proud general announcing a new government established by coup. Instead, the frame shows someone more uncertain: a figure that resembles a soldier in an off-angle shot from below. He holds the recording device in his right hand—at around waist height—and points it up at a side profile of his face. The frame shakes in his hand. His eyes shift around. His sticky breath accelerates as words fall from his mouth, and his head darts around at something beyond the frame. The disciplinary formation from which the soldier emerges demands a different choreography: a fixed gaze, an upright bearing, a stillness that signals command. Instead, we have something less stable. We get the soldier, but we get it slant. What the livestream catches is a body shaped by and for the apparatus but no longer contained by it: an iteration with a difference. The choreography of the soldier comes with an improvised movement against it. This inhabitation is already, from the first shaking frame, a kind of sabotage. What we witness from the outset, then, is the emergence of a counter-conduct: a fugitive moving through the infrastructure of its own production, already guilty of charges—treason, espionage, desertion—that could follow if it is caught alive.

Bushnell comes to the capital under a false pretense. He is not a representative of governance but a practitioner of its undoing—a sort of double agent whose doubling performs something structural, but does so as a tactical reversal. In other words, he performs an enfolding of subjectivities that unfolds them. When he speaks of his complicity—“My name is Aaron Bushnell. I am an active-duty member of the United States Air Force, and I will no longer be complicit in genocide”—each clause names a distinct layer of subjectivation: the citizen who watches the genocide, the soldier who enforces it, the insurgent who refuses both. These are not parallel identities held in the same body but conflicting conducts in active friction as the co-constitution of soldier and citizen compressed into flesh and brought into the open as a crisis through an act of refusal. Multiple forces of subjectivation accelerate through his body, generating inertia in the shift and rub of compiled layers of various conducts and counter-conducts. In this sense, Bushnell’s speech speaks to these relations by tracing lines of force to the production of the subject as the reproduction of biopolitical governance through the bios. He seeks out a little movement, an opening in a loop, a hack in the ready-made body of the American soldier, which is to say, the hegemonic body politic. In doing so, he risks his life.

This is why he trembles: by speaking of his complicity in a genocide, Bushnell admits his own criminality, which was always already itself a double incrimination. He speaks as a citizen of the United States and as a soldier of its military, whose most powerful weapon, in each case, is the claim to the virtues of American life. Bushnell both confirms and refuses that the formation of the American way of life by establishing its relationship to genocide and unfreedom. In citing the multiple coordinates that constitute him as a subject of complicity, Bushnell explicitly links a new iteration of the American subject to the context of the genocide in Palestine. His speech thereby extends this subject’s citational referent from the virtues of the American way of life and its reproduction to the debilitation of Palestinian life in Gaza. In doing so, Bushnell becomes an internally displaced person who speaks out against the state from within the confines of its enclosure.

To be clear, Bushnell’s counter-conduct depends on the very apparatus it disrupts. The act is legible because of the soldier’s significance within the biopolitical order, and this legibility is itself a product of the disciplinary formation being opposed. Counter-conduct, as mentioned earlier, operates from within the form it disrupts, inhabiting that form precisely in order to turn it against itself. Bushnell cannot perform this counter-conduct as just anybody. The act requires the soldier’s body, the choreography, the fatigues, the Embassy, and the military posture because what is being disassembled must have first been assembled to be recognized as such. The dependence on legibility is not a limitation of the resistance, but its very mechanism: the soldier is both made and unmade through social conduct. Bushnell’s counter-conduct differs drastically from other forms of resistance, such as army desertion or laying down arms in battle, where individuals misbehave or misconduct themselves in order to maintain life (their own or others). To say, for example, “I won’t sacrifice my life for this nation” is to preserve one’s life through resignation or withdrawal from soldierly conduct. To say, “I won’t bear arms against another human being” also carries a valorization of life, but through a misconduct of soldiery. A soldier’s self-immolation does not oppose the principle of self-sacrifice for a collective, nor the taking of life to preserve life—the capacity to conduct life and death makes the soldier a soldier. Bushnell never abandons the post, in this sense. That is, what distinguishes counter-conduct from mere misbehavior or withdrawal is not that it escapes the formal practice, but that it exhausts that practice by carrying it to its limit. Bushnell does not escape the soldier so much as he takes the soldier all the way.

As Bushnell arrives at the Embassy, the viewer can now anticipate something happening—is now also complicit in something happening. He sets up the camera against solid ground, changing the frame to a stable and removed point of view, compared to the shaky intimacy framed in his approach. He has initiated the scene of his disassemblage. As he reenters the frame, he follows a disciplined procedure and adheres to a specific order of operations. His movements are smooth and controlled. The soldier marches deliberately into full view—appearing somewhat distant and impersonal—in front of the Israeli Embassy. In a tight sequence, he pivots to face the camera, swiftly raises his left arm over his head to pour fuel from a water bottle, and positions a camo cap exactly one finger space above his eyebrows, aligned perfectly with his nose. Standing at attention, the soldier lights a flame and touches it to his pant leg, shouting “Free Palestine” repeatedly as flames consume his body. By subjecting the body to rigorous and brutal counter-conduct, the soldier uses his entire capacity to debilitate the model and mechanism of governance—himself. He makes the killing machine impossible by performing a process that disassembles its component parts at the molecular level. In other words, we see him submit the unifying material of his authorized subjectivity—which is to say, his body and its capacities—to a radical process of undoing: the soldier flips the choreography of the national cause against itself, synchronizing his insurgent resistance to the American way of life with the transnational Palestinian movement.

6. Unmanageable time

While Bushnell’s self-immolation can be placed in multiple temporalities, the process of undoing happens explicitly for the duration of 119 seconds that cannot be governed or narrated back into the order of those timelines. While we can historicize his act of protest in reference to his personal life, that timeline is one of Bushnell’s interiority, a linear, enclosed, and ordered narration. There is also the temporality of the live event itself that took place just before 1:00 pm on February 25th in Washington, D.C. One could also consider the livestream as its own temporality, one with a quality of liveness, despite a minor lag in processing. However, in each of these temporalities, there is a period of 119 seconds when the body is on fire and cannot be represented by these other timelines. The period of disassembling the biopolitical subject operates for the duration of 119 seconds when fire activates the state of matter, comprising a particular temporality of dying: a time when Bushnell’s life is intensified by his capacity to approach death through self-debilitation. In the thermodynamics of self-immolation, the very material of the exemplary subject becomes a stateless free radical: not a solid, liquid, or gas—not a soldier—but an irreversible process, a movement, a fugitive dance, an ephemeral flow of unmanageable energy in outward relay, a radiant force, a release of affective potential. While biopolitical governance manages life by conducting the body’s movements and manages death by robbing the body of movement, dying by fire protests the time management of both life and death.

The unmanageability of Bushnell’s protest did not go on without reaction, however. There are several instances in the video where different authorities enter the scene to intervene in the body’s self-destruction. One instance of management comes from a voice outside the frame, calling to Bushnell as he dumps the accelerant over his body: “Hi, sir, can I help you? Can I help you, sir?” We do not know who attempts to hail Bushnell at this moment, but we can assume it is a state authority, both because of the location and because of the muffled sound of monotone voices in the background coming over a radio. We can hear the urgency, the activity, the suspicion of agents coming through an electric current to someone out of the frame but in Bushnell’s presence. This person has come to investigate the strange behavior of the soldier through a call for direct aid—through a call to management. “How can I conduct you, sir?” While he has made himself noticeable, Bushnell is not an alarming figure to the state at this point. His semi-soldierly air allowed him to approach the Embassy until now, but his peculiar attitude has put the guards of law and order on alert. We can assume more are on their way. Despite the repeated calls, Bushnell never turns to recognize the speaker. He refuses to turn and stand at attention when given a direct order—a call to order. He refuses to be interpellated by the state authority, and thus refuses to be hailed either as a soldier or a criminal. He exercises extreme self-discipline and proceeds to light himself on fire.

The other instance of management comes shortly after the first, during the scene of dying. This time, the authorities conduct themselves more forcefully than in the first instance. They make themselves visible. Rather than appeal for help from an authorized political subject (a soldier or citizen behaving oddly) from afar, the two officers rush into the frame—seemingly from nowhere. One wears plain, all-black clothing, black sunglasses, and a gun. He appears to be a citizen, but is likely a secret service agent. The other one wears a white shirt, black pants, and an equipment belt. He looks like an officer. They try again to hail him—“Hey! Hey!”—before they command him to “get on the ground” over and over again. The sound of multiple sirens penetrates the scene almost instantly thereafter, and we can imagine they are coming for him as a swarm. At the same time, a total frenzy of official voices enters the scene from the officers’ radios, ordering the conduct of those officers present. It is almost like a scene from a riot. We hear one officer yell for fire extinguishers. We see the fire grow larger and larger. The soldier struggles to stay on his feet while burning. As he does so, he manages to find the will to scream “Free Palestine!” over and over, cutting through the direct orders coming to him from multiple sources of authority. Once Bushnell finally does fall to the ground, two men approach him. One points a gun at Bushnell’s burning body, and the other sprays him with an extinguishing agent. One comes with the intention to condemn Bushnell to death, and the other comes to save his life. In either case, the officers witness the performance of dying and react to it by applying pressure to a body in motion in order to halt its flight, stop its track, and regulate the biopolitical order, either by capacitating the body through aid or debilitating it further by killing the man. Both see the self-immolating body of the American soldier and respond to it by using their training to manage the situation. One authority sees the scene of a soldier self-immolating as a risk to the broader biopolitical matrix—that is, to the American way of life—and responds by threatening lethal force, the bullet. The other sees a scene of a soldier self-immolating and responds by attempting to rehabilitate the particular subject deemed worth saving. In the closing seconds of the live stream, we see several officers swarm a body in transition. They have come to solve the problem of dying; they want to quell the uprising.

They have come to establish the state of the exemplary political subject as either living or dead. But the dying body, in this case, executes an escape plan, finds a moment of respite from regulation, a hideout from the mechanisms of governance that capacitate and authorize the life of some subjects and debilitate others upon death. The discourses through which biopolitical governance operates speak only of the living or the dead, ignoring the dying while being totally affected by it. Consider, for example, the variety of compulsions to explain or critique Bushnell’s protest unto death by instrumentalizing his life or denouncing the efficacy of his death while never attending to the scene of dying itself.Footnote ³⁴ Even sympathetic responses to self-immolation—for example, Barack Obama’s May 2011 remarks about Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation that compared his act to the defiance of Revolutionary-era patriots in Boston and the dignity of Rosa Parks—produce knowledge that abstracts the scene of dying and suspends the dying body in the symbolics of American political subjectivity.Footnote ³⁵ The body on fire is not invisible to the discourse that makes meaning from life and death. In fact, the rush of officers and the volume of journal articles and opinion pieces trying to understand it all confirm that the visual dimensions of self-immolation affect people on a deeply sensory level. What the dying body resists is not recognition but its management: it cannot be stably positioned or constituted by the field of biopolitical governance. It is an uncontainable process rather than a misrecognized or unrecognized event. I posit that this unmanageability is due to the transitional capacity of a body during a debilitating process. Dying is a process incommensurable with the command to life or death, but is indexed by both. When Bushnell sets himself on fire, he initiates an exothermic process, a release of energy from matter that moves people toward the possibility of something otherwise.

7. Circulation and the collective

To understand how Bushnell’s act stimulates collective movement, we must attend to what is released by his radical undoing rather than looking for what it represents. The merger of Bushnell’s act and the broader Palestinian movement in the demonstrations that followed his death—in Washington, New York, London, Jericho, and across dozens of cities—is not reducible to the meaning of Bushnell’s act, which remained contested and unresolved in public discourse. The demonstrations were responses to a force. To account for this force, Foucault’s formulation of counter-conduct as the opening of possibility and Sara Ahmed’s theorization of affect as a circulatory economy are useful. For Foucault, counter-conduct does not leave a void where a form of governance once was. Instead, it opens what he describes as a field of possibility for being conducted differently—a crack in the normative organization of life through which other forms of conduct become imaginable and, crucially, practicable.Footnote ³⁶ Bushnell’s act, understood as counter-conduct, does not merely refuse the soldier’s choreography. It performs that refusal in public, in real time, in a form that cannot be absorbed into routine, opening a field of possibility in which resistance can find a new form.

Ahmed’s theorization of affective economies becomes necessary here as a way to think about the constitution of this field of possibility as an aesthetic field of felt sensation. Ahmed argues that affects do not reside in individual subjects or in objects but circulate between bodies, accumulating force and intensity through that circulation.Footnote ³⁷ Affect, in her account of terror attacks, finds valorization not in a fixed sign or meaning but in circulating through materials and bodies, expanding through contact rather than through intention or meaning.Footnote ³⁸ What circulates is a charge—an orientation of bodies toward or away from something—that gathers force as it passes through more and more bodies.Footnote ³⁹ Crucially, this circulation through bodies is not ahistorical: affects “stick” to bodies through prior association, accumulating residue from earlier attachments that shape how they are received and transmitted.Footnote ⁴⁰ What sticks here is not a meaning to be decoded but an accumulated charge. The “signs” at issue are not representations awaiting interpretation but sedimented associations—residues of force—so that the question is never what the burning soldier signifies but what, in circulating, it does to the bodies it reaches. Bushnell’s counter-conduct referenced a conduct that was already saturated with prior “stickings,” that of the American soldier. His uniform carries the accumulated association of American governmentality—its authority, its violence—so that the soldier burning in uniform, in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, reorganizes what those signs have previously stuck to and normalized. The Israeli Embassy, as a site of extraterritorial sovereignty and diplomatic legitimacy, becomes—through Bushnell’s act—undone. Each of these signs arrives at the scene of Bushnell’s self-immolation already loaded, and his act redistributes their affective charge, turning prior associations against themselves.

What I want to draw out is how the opening of conduct by Bushnell’s counter-conduct emerges in circulation as an ungovernable aesthetics of dying. In this sense, what was encountered by innumerable people across different contexts, mediums (live, video, textual account, etc.), and political positions was not primarily a message but an affective charge in Ahmed’s sense: the force of a conducted body taken to the limit of conduct, the unbearable 119 seconds of a soldier burning, and the words “Free Palestine” spoken through the fire. That charge did not produce a unified understanding so much as a relay of unsettlement—the sensation of negation—or a disturbance in the ordinary organization of a settled norm, an opening for a reorientation of bodies in relation to the social field they inhabit. The counter-conduct cracks open the figure of the soldier, and through that crack the distribution of sensation—an ungovernable aesthetic—releases a charge that stirs bodies. Accounts of responses to the act from comrades of Bushnell describe something similar: people encountered his act as a force that moved them, and they found themselves already in motion due to the affective capacity of self-immolation before they could fully articulate why:

This quality of collective movement emerges from an ungovernable aesthetics of dying: a charge that accumulates force through circulation faster than discourse can stabilize it into a fixed sign.

Taken together, these two frameworks allow us to say something about the relationship between Bushnell’s individual act and the collective movement it stirred. The act, as counter-conduct, cracked open the normative organization of life—the seamless reproduction of authorized existence amidst authorized death—and created a field in which being conducted differently became possible, even if momentarily. The affective charge released by the act circulated through bodies that encountered it, accumulating force and producing a shared unsettlement that exceeded any individual’s grief or anger. The merger of Bushnell’s act with the Palestinian resistance movement, in the form of demonstrations, material ephemera, and memorials, is evidence that this charge transferred as a force that reoriented them toward one another and toward a collective refusal of the norm.

To understand Bushnell’s self-immolation as a performance of counter-conduct is to understand how the biopolitical relation posits the necessity of a corporeal performance of resistance, the necessity of new practices for living. It is exactly there—at the material level of the flesh—where movement toward something new can be found. By de-subjectifying life through the immolation of the body, Bushnell’s performance envisions something akin to an eschatology: an end to the norms of our time. In this vision, a soldier who sacrifices himself does so not for the national project but for a transnational spirit of resistance to genocide. What is produced by his self-immolation is not a call to mass death but a call for resistance and alternative forms of living. As if to at once draw and break away from a line between the history of this biopolitical subject and the brutalization of Palestinian life, Bushnell’s final call—the utterance “Free Palestine!”—comes at the exact moment the docile body is released from docility, becoming ungovernable. In the days, weeks, months, and now years following Bushnell’s death, the people who have taken to the streets in Washington, New York, London, and Jericho have done so not as individuals but as a collective brought together over great distances by the call to be governed differently. They have done so in commitment to a free Palestine.