So Much Wasted: Hunger, Performance, and the Morbidity of Resistance

Perverse Modernities

by Patrick Anderson, J. Jack Halberstam (Series Editor), Lisa Lowe (Series Editor)

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.

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Patrick Anderson is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, the Department of Ethnic Studies, and the Critical Gender Studies Program, at the University of California, San Diego.
source: https://www.amazon.com/Patrick-Anders...

Reviews

[Marsela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anderson was exceptionally good at achieving his goal of weaving self-starvation in the clinic, gallery, and prison all together. Although I found the exploration of eating disorders a bit flat, I understood the behemoth of a topic undertaken and thought the landscape was still well-described enough. The lay of the land for the two following sections read much better and more potently. Overall an excellent first dip into the discourse surrounding self-starvation, quite accessible to read even for someone who hasn't read much on performance studies in multiple years.

[c · Rating 4 out of 5]

overall incredibly interesting and convincing! however if i took a shot every time Anderson began a sentence with “Indeed” i’d be howling naked in the street by now

[Annie Lukins · Rating 5 out of 5]

self starvation is a knotted topic and there was something going on, i thot, especially after reading the hunger artist by kafka so long ago. there is something really raw and weird in self starvation, and i think the conventional discourse around eating disorders is a little alienating and wrong. this book writes about the possibility of self starvation as a radical assertion of agency for artists and other subversive folks.