The article deals with fire as a metaphor of radical socio‐political change, focusing on the paradoxical relationship between mobility and immobility. It opens with a topological discussion where fire signifies an instance of ‘absolute immobility’, or, politically speaking, the ‘emergency break’ of the empty, chronological time. There is, however, a pharmakon‐like, aporetic dimension to fire. The article articulates this dimension in the context of nihilism, linking this to the sociology of mobility.