Overcoming Unseriousness
What's the Proper Response to the Current Moment?
Like many of you, my inbox is filled with various reminders of a better, fuller, more hedonistic and carefree life. And probably like many of you, I am occasionally sick of these reminders. For over two decades I have been interested in, and writing on, various currents of ascetic practice as they pertain to currents of political life and events in the world. A few other scholars are doing work in this area and producing really compelling scholarship, especially in feminism and international relations. My own approach and interest crested about a decade ago, and such as it was, it tended to focus more on historical and religious aspects. Then as now, it is clear to me that ascetic politics always understands itself as commensurate with conditions in the world: the hunger strike or fast often takes place to signify one’s solidarity with others who cannot feed themselves. Or: in prison — for example in the prisons at GTMO where “enemy combatants” were held in solitary confinement without charge — such actions are the most severe form of asymmetrical warfare, in a sense an assertion of humanity-in-vulnerability and mortality, against forces of extreme dehumanization.
So: I am interested in food-as-protest, eating (and not-eating) as a fraught and symbolic action, one that is shot-through with symbolic spiritual importance. Against this backdrop, and during both Ramadan and Lent, it feels weird and somehow gross to be on the receiving end of various hedonic visions which clearly attempt to cultivate a post-pandemic sense of FOMO. At least personally, I sense a serious vibe shift: I feel like we now live in a new affective conjuncture different from the profoundly influential moment associated most closely with the lives and work of Tony Bourdain or maybe Jim Harrison. Those lives were cool and glorious, but they are gone, and from a critical perspective, one attuned to the abyss of political and cultural life in the current moment, they don’t feel right. They don’t feel sufficiently serious.
It’s probably not fair to ask someone how they would react to their friends and colleagues being abjectly targeted and killed by Zionists in Gaza. Not once, but twice. I am almost sure that I would have qualms about receiving the medal of freedom from Biden after this experience. Is this simply a disposition or professional deformation? Perhaps, but goddamn it, the liberal pivot to “exemplary joy” or the anarchist “prefigurative politics” feels wrong to me. Liberals in particular need to learn how to be serious again, lest they join with conservatives and start to look like the ghouls in Grosz’s Pillars of Society:
