Critical Stages (Jun 2021)
The Self-Immolation of David Buckel: Towards a Postdramatic Activism
Abstract
On 14 April 2018, lawyer and environmental activist David Buckel burned himself to death in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in what has been called the first self-immolation in the name of climate change. Yet, few people have heard about his final, extraordinary act of protest and even fewer people witnessed it. Some in the press and the attentive public, conditioned by conventional dramatic expectations, have critiqued Buckel’s protest as a failed performance. However, drawing from Hans-Thies Lehmann’s theory of postdramatic theatre, I propose that climate change—causally diffuse, non-linear, slow-moving and often invisible—presents, among other things, a challenge to dominant modes of perception. I argue that, when viewed through a postdramatic lens, Buckel’s self-immolation successfully interrupts our politics of spectacle, gesturing towards a new aesthetic for environmental activism that eschews conventional dramatic narratives and decenters the human.
