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. Honing in on the complicated relationship between those who starve themselves for various reasons and the cultural and political contexts of which they are a part, he examines the diagnostic history of anorexia nervosa, fasts staged by artists including Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic, and a hunger strike initiated by Turkish prisoners. Anderson explores what it means for the clinic, gallery, and prison for one to perform a refusal to consume as a strategy of negation or resistance, and how self-starvation, as a project of refusal aimed (however unconsciously) towards 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, life and death, intertwine.
