But when you've got fires to watch, the night passes a lot more pleasantly, it's not a hardship anymore, you're not alone.
[Louis-Ferdinand Céline]
“In recent decades, interest in fasting artists has greatly diminished. While it once warranted staging such spectacles independently, today it would be absolutely impossible. Those were different times. Back then, the whole city was preoccupied with the fasting artist; with each day of fasting, public interest grew; everyone wanted to see the fasting artist at least once a day; and in the final days, there were even subscribers who sat for entire days in front of his small cage.”
In 1922, Kafka published a short story titled Ein Hungerkünstler (A Hunger Artist). The text traces the professional life of a rather unusual artist—a fasting artist, to be precise. His prolonged fasts took place inside a cage displayed to the public, with spectators attending in large numbers and with great enthusiasm. He had lived this way for many years, with brief and regular intervals of rest. He fasted. As he had always done, and with increasing ease. But over time, “as if by secret agreement, a real aversion to fasting as a spectacle had arisen.” The artist was then forced to sign a contract with a circus, where he was assigned a peripheral cage next to the animal enclosures. In any case, the change did not improve his fortunes; the crowd continued to show little interest and even less patience. The straw became increasingly comfortable, and while his conviction to continue fasting remained firm, his pride seemed to have vanished: “I must fast, I can’t help it, because I’ve never found food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I wouldn’t have made a fuss and would have stuffed myself like you and everyone else.”
Kafka’s fasting artist highlights something we often overlook: humans do not eat merely to nourish themselves. Unlike animals, humans constantly transform food—using their hands, salt, and eyes. Food gathers a set of protocols, behaviors, and practices that develop beyond their specific purpose. Appetite, hunger, even voracity, therefore, do not simply demand the fulfillment of a need—the need to eat. They do not seek satisfaction but rather to move forward, to proceed without stopping. Lacan, more than anyone, contributed to outlining the circuit between need, demand, and desire. The object of the drive, food, is called upon to saturate what cannot be filled, because the drive is always tied to desire, and even before the teeth grasp the morsel, the concept of satiety is inherently excluded. “Thus, desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference resulting from the subtraction of the first from the second, the very phenomenon of their split (Spaltung).” This can lead the subject to feel repulsion for what would otherwise satisfy their palate, fearing that the same foods might be harmful, contaminate them, or cause weight gain.
I’m fine. I just want to tidy up. To put things in order. At first, I went crazy. I spent hours cleaning the baseboards; the paint had to be perfectly white. I got up in the middle of the night to check all the faucets, tightening them so they wouldn’t drip. I washed and rewashed the dishes. The tea stains from the cups. I didn’t want anything to stick to them. I quickly devoured the dishes that wouldn’t make me gain weight. And I wondered what that smooth white tasted like. I wanted nothing to stick to it until the white became transparency and the transparency gripped me.
The latest 2013 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders expands the sections dedicated to feeding and eating disorders, broadening the diagnostic subcategories. There are eight. Anorexia and bulimia receive the most attention. Obesity, however, retains its ambiguous role: excluded from the list of disorders, it introduces the discussion of eating disorders before their true beginning—personifying the disorders themselves, their author, their prologue. An allegory, not a symbol. Because it is never sated, because it is never full. “A wide range of genetic, psychological, behavioral, and environmental factors that vary among individuals contribute to the development of obesity, which therefore should not be examined as a mental disorder. On the other hand, there are strong associations between obesity and a number of mental disorders (including binge eating disorder, depressive and bipolar disorders, and schizophrenia). The side effects of certain psychotropic medications significantly contribute to the development of obesity, and obesity itself may be a risk factor for the onset of certain mental disorders.”
I didn’t respond when he tried to talk to me, but I eagerly took the plate he offered, eating it quickly. I liked fasting then, to compensate for how much I had eaten in those days. Sometimes I felt dizzy at night. I took bread after work, and apple peels. Nothing else. I liked listening to my stomach grumble from hunger, knowing I was hungry and not full. I suffered from constant migraines. I ate irregularly. I feared that swallowing would send food into my lungs, leaving me to die choking. I didn’t really believe what they taught us in biology about bones and muscles. I thought everything would spill out. And I would be left empty.
