ABSTRACT
Most academic work dealing with self-burning in political protest are found in psychiatric journals where a political dimension is seen simply to distinguish it therapeutically from other suicides. Self-burnings, like hunger strikes to death or suicide bombings, appear to be inverted sacrifices in this sense: institutions or formations of primary violence that rupture and break with extant social order, without promising any resolution in an alternative social order or sovereign semiosis. Jan Palach's suicide is seen as a critical point in the cartography of the Prague Spring as an assemblage of desire. It was a suicide in more ways than simply an individual death, bringing an end to a collective movement of creative political desire. Questions are clearly raised here for Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's defence of the concept of caution as more than the calling card of the counter-revolutionary, but the event also directs our attention to the presence of a terrifying international suicide machine.
