Overview

In So Much Wasted, Patrick Anderson analyzes self-starvation as a significant mode of staging political arguments across the institutional domains of the clinic, the gallery, and the prison. Homing in on those who starve themselves for various reasons and the cultural and political contexts in which they do so, he examines the diagnostic history of anorexia nervosa, fasts staged by artists including Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramović, and a hunger strike initiated by Turkish prisoners. Anderson explores what it means for the clinic, the gallery, and the prison when one performs a refusal to consume as a strategy of negation or resistance, and the ways that self-starvation, as a project of refusal aimed, however unconsciously, toward death, produces violence, suffering, disappearance, and loss differently from other practices. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Agamben, Peggy Phelan, and others, he considers how the subject of self-starvation is refigured in relation to larger institutional and ideological drives, including those of the state. The ontological significance of performance as disappearance constitutes what Anderson calls the “politics of morbidity,” the embodied, interventional embrace of mortality and disappearance not as destructive, but rather as radically productive stagings of subject formations in which subjectivity and objecthood, presence and absence, and life and death are intertwined.

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9780822348191

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Reviews

In this brilliant and important book, Patrick Anderson dramatically expands our understanding of anorexia by foregrounding its theatricality and reflexivity, and linking it to prison hunger strikes and certain kinds of endurance art. He shows us how central the self is to all of these practices, both as object, and as agent. Self-starvation is often the theatre of last resort, the stage on which a person performs when all others have been removed. It can also be a way of spitting out the poisonous images that one has been forced to incorporate. And even a well-balanced meal is not psychically nourishing when you are compelled to eat it, Anderson argues in the last and most compelling chapter of this book. Force-feeding does not support life; it promotes, rather, a living death. oKaja Silverman, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Patrick Anderson is Associate Professor of Communication and a faculty affiliate of Critical Gender Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego. He is a co-editor of Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict.

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