ABSTRACT
It is a truism that the defeat of nefarious political hegemony, the dissolution of repressive power, the disarticulation of class control, and the redistribution of power and surplus all pivot on the concept of sacrifice. Struggle, in all its variegations, requires giving up on the comparative safety of homeostasis, or normative subjection, for the challenge of transformation. The chapter suggests the contemporary geography of power elicits a prescient dialectical image of sacrifice and that justice and revolution might usefully attend to cultural imagination, but precisely to immolation in understanding of crisis, a point where the literary can provide a provocative corollary. The chapter uses immolation to assert the paradigmatic crisis, that the problem of will, decision, and selfhood should not be assumed to fold into the confines of subjective desire, devotion, and conviction. Immolation itself stages the difference and revolution depends on such difference.
