Self-immolation has emerged as one of the most powerful forms of political protest in the age of media, capable of moving people across vast distances into collective action. In 2024, Aaron Bushnell, an active-duty US Air Force serviceman, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., in protest against the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. This essay reads Bushnell’s self-immolation as an act of resistance to US governmentality by using the disciplinary choreography of the American soldier against itself. The essay describes how Bushnell stages a disassembling of the American soldier to reveal an entanglement between the reproduction of the American way of life and the production of Palestinian death in Gaza. Further, the essay argues that Bushnell’s act does not simply protest the genocide in Gaza but performs what I call the ungovernable aesthetics of dying: an immanent, embodied critique of an apparatus of governance that normalizes genocide as a means of managing its possible resistance. Gaza, then, becomes a lens through which the structure of American biopolitical governance becomes inescapably legible. When Bushnell burns the soldier’s body, he transforms it into an exothermic process and, in doing so, releases an affective force that moves people across distances, producing a collective refusal of the American way of life.