Sunday, April 25, 2004
(8:51 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Asceticism of Protest
Has there ever been a person, a real person, who renounced the pleasures of the world out of protest? Not because of the pollution those pleasures bring, not because of the clear reason such renunciation will engender, but because worldly pleasures are quite simply not good enough?
Kafka's "Hunger Artist" seems to fall outside the normal rubric of asceticism. The popular perception within the story-world is that he is an aesthete, devoted to fasting as to an art form, fasting-for-fasting's-sake--a nihilistic fasting. When he reveals his real motivation, that he simply never found any food he liked, it at first sounds completely absurd, again outside the pale of "normal" asceticism. (Zizek's reading of this story strikes me as completely wrong: it is not the case that the Hunger Artist is actively eating nothing [italics in original]; he is not, sad to say, tarrying with the negative.)
Yet Kafka is known to have had an active religious imagination, and I would ask whether the ascetic is ever doing anything but waiting for a food he'll really like -- purifying himself for the food of heaven, refusing anything but the food of heaven, like the mystic nun who starved herself by eating nothing but the eucharistic elements. Is asceticism always a protest? Has there ever been a world in which such asceticism, such protest, was more necessary, precisely because completely incomprehensible? The asceticism of veganism: the beginning, perhaps of a new religion for our time, a great refusal of the artificiality that penetrates to our very bones.
I walk through the grocery store, drive down the street, look in the refrigerator, and ask, "Where can I find some real food?" Without knowing quite what it means, I choose to abstain until confronted with real food, consuming words with a strange incomprehension bred by hunger, by the deepest dissatisfaction. For me there has never been any moderation between the real thing and nothing at all, and so occasionally I tense up, shaking my fist at the world, shaken physically by a dissatisfaction, above all, with myself.
