I have always had a powerful fascination/repulsion with asceticism, or the will-to-discipline oneself by means of regimes that come from many different places (religion most obviously, but also philosophy, art, revolutionary politics and so on). This interest was so strong that I essentially wrote a dissertation about it, albeit one that addressed the topic in an allusive and indirect way, and in a way that (looking back now) strikes me as somewhat naive. What wasn’t naive, however, was a central principle that needs assertion and repeated emphasis in our own time and place: the origins of ascetic discipline in late antiquity/early Christianity were not primarily focused on sex. Our late-modern bourgeois world is much more focused on the sexualized body, both as a site of transgression (whether one wants to celebrate it or stamp it out) and the creation of norms, but most centrally as part of that late-modern notion of individual “identity.” If you’re a reader of Foucault, you’re probably already familiar with this thesis, but the question remains: If not the sexualized body, then what? What were the drives, appetites, impulses primarily associated with the body and a result the focus of ascetic forms of discipline at the very origin of what Foucault calls the “intoxication of religious feeling” in the second, third and fourth centuries? If not a religious politics of sex, then what? As Peter Brown convincingly argues, the original focus was not on the suppression of the reproductive impulse (for obvious reasons), but control over bodily hunger. Not metaphorical hunger, but the actual drive of the living organism for energy to fuel the metabolic process. A food asceticism rather than a sex asceticism.
The manuscript I am working on now focuses on this concept, and traces its genealogy back to this period. Put differently, I am working on a genealogy of hunger, both as a political artifact (something imposed on populations by settler-colonial states for example) and more positively as an insurrectionary tactic against such regimes. It might seem counterintuitive and even (as the kids say these days) “problematic” to think of (sometimes punishing) forms of self-discipline as a fulcrum for changing the existing order. And indeed, yes, there are all kinds of reasons to be wary of theorizing ascetics, especially in an indifferent world, or even in a world where human suffering is mocked. This becomes especially clear when we consider the relation of asceticism to obedience, for while this relation can be one that undermines claims of legitimacy especially when it comes to norms of beneficence and care, this “undermining” doesn’t happen by means of a rejection of the relationship of obedience but by an intensification of it. It takes the secularized “pastoral” power of the state (in the modern world these are the terms we need to use) and says “yes” to it, by in various ways redoubling it. It “takes control” of an unstable, unsettling world by means of appropriating existing limits and (re)turning them on oneself by means of a regimen that can have the capacity to do various deconstructive things to political (or religious or cultural, etc) powers.1
It can call attention, for example, to the ridiculous ways the political order expects us to endure endless rounds of austerity, not by living a life of excess but by inverting and intensifying its self-negating logics. It is even “surplus obedience” of the kind Frédéric Gros discussed, but used now in a positive fashion, as something that parodies and undermines and ridicules those in power. While in ordinary “everyday” life that surplus is extracted and appropriated by capital (and ideology does the work to make sure that we joyfully submit our obedience beyond what is expected), there is the even more joyful possibility of re-appropriating surplus for oneself.
I realize that an insurrectionary politics of self-negation may not be everyone's cup of tea. But for those who are already under the thumb of precarity and endless austerity, what other options are there?
I obviously have in mind a liberatory, Left form of asceticism, and yet I am reminded by a recent post of John Ganz that fascists have also styled themselves as rebels of a sort, aiming to mobilize a kind of surplus obedience. In his words, “This was an avant-garde reacting to a sense of stifling conformity and mediocrity and the choice for many of them was not to remain within the netherworld of Bohemian anomie, but to embrace a new, more radical forms of conformity.” This is a much longer point to develop, but perhaps the pivotal difference between right and left rests on the contrast between the “conformity” specified here, versus solidarity (for example of the kind Peter Brown discusses: food asceticism as a gesture of compassion for those who are involuntarily hungry, and also as a figuration of what Paul called a “glorified” body).
There is an aspect of asceticism, or at least the attraction to it, that is as focused on the attainment of SENSATION itself. One looks for wisdom, (or enlightenment, etc…), thru the feeling that one will attain by, for instance, fasting. (I’m just spit-balling here, forgive the tortured writing please!) The Ascetic has more in common with the sensualist, the decadent, even the inebriate then might seem at first glance.
You’re newsletter is fantastic, btw. Keep up the good work.