fangirls

anonymous
“When one reaches out to take the
bread and brings it into one’s mouth
to eat it, one goes out of oneself in
order to return so as to remain within
the domain of one’s own subjectivity,
proximate to the bread, sincerely
ready to feed oneself. In this case, the
bread did not stop in front of the
senses. It instead slid before them,
almost becoming not so much an
object as something nutritious.
But really to see reality must be
something quite different. This
involves entering into the mystery of
the as
of reality, which could be
found, for example, in the way of
making bread or in the peculiar
beauty or ugliness of it, or in thinking
of the one who kneaded it, of how that
was done and how much they were
paid, or, going even further, thinking
of the long history during which bread
has fed man, and, in short, ending up
in the mystery that bread exists. But
here bread is no longer an object. It
becomes something sacred. The as
of
the bread is recovered, its simple,
though tremendous, presence. At this
point it is difficult to eat it without
further ado, since one may look at it or
worship it because it is now a lot more
than a solution to hunger, and in a
way, it moves into the domain of
salvation. There, in the case of eating
it, one transcends simple nutrition and
one feeds on the true dimension of
The idea of everything food had touched
was unbearable, the sheer information of
it. Of every time he had held in his mind
an orange.
“Daily life turns into a terror as soon as
you start doubting food--” (Kraus 2000,
160)
"To protect her last optimism, she goes
crazy." (Berlant) The web gets tighter until
nothing can get past it without pinging
off monstrous significance in
unbearable/intolerable directions- A
refusal to eat and be eaten. Perhaps
you'd like to sample an anti-psychotic
marketed for children? Perhaps spend
the next month laughing at a tranquilizer
with a smiling giraffe on the wrapper?
“But since food’s a disembodied signifier,
there’s almost always something missing,
something wrong with the picture. (When
I can’t eat it’s because I feel totally
alone.)” (Kraus 2000, 165)
This alimentary doubt is often articulated
as a fear of contamination, implying a
unitary self coherent enough to be
invaded. This accounts for some of the
stickiness of brattiness surrounding
the food.
That is why to see the as
of bread is
terrifying. It is not because of the
bread itself, but because of the mental
inclination of the average man of the
big city, protected by a secondhand
science, thinking in terms of utility,
believing that the issue has been
treated with sufficient seriousness.
Because of all of that, the surprising
dimension of bread must appear
monstrous to him. It is the monstrosity
that peeks out in the presence of
things, when they are not alone in an
empty space, but rather are tainted by
a numinous background which
provides them with a raison d’
tre that
transcends their mere utility.” (Kusch,
152-153)
"We might ask why it seems more
likely that anorexic women are
negatively affected by images
conflating desirability and emaciation,
or by other discursive representations
anorexia. Kristeva's trifold categorical
abjections, broadly: "in relation to food
and bodily incorporation, to bodily waste,
and to the signs of sexual difference."
(Warin 82) Certain foods and substances
lend themselves more to contamination
than others, especially those that are of
an uncertain phase state, "Calorie girls
are worried about airborne contagion
whereas the fats and oil girls and
concerned with touch." (Warin, 84).
Perhaps this fear is more of a concern
with etiquette within a scene of
heightened porousness and dispersion
than a belief in the preciousness of the
interior. It seems to me cynical to imagine
that the practice of preparing foods with
gloved hands or of stuffing towels under
doors to prevent flying calories is strictly
the representational outcome of a drastic
internalization of popular nutritional
information and body image hegemony
concerning fats and fatness.
"A single taste of some pure and holy
food could return you to your originary
nature, your ability to discern good from
evil...But there is nothing pure and holy in
this world." (Kleeman 181)
the perfect foods have at various times
been imagined to look like:
warm goat milk warm from a goat body.
this i am drinking in the tarped morning.
two perfect figs palmed. he refuses
because he's vegan, "the moth thing."
of femininity—more likely than, say,
being affectively overwhelmed by
matter’s vibrancy? Or by the unrestful
proclivities of matter being brought to
matter?" (Ledwell-Hunt, 272)
a mouthful of sweet cicely from the north
cascades easily confused with poison
hemlock
a camassia root baked soft in a pit
eating wasn't as hard as we'd imagined
the ground was soft with years
a parsley salad doused in salt lemon
honey. long live pine nuts long live a
sardine atop perhaps
a messy salmon caught by pointblank
crossbow in the park. hippies think
they're so resilient and versatile their
white flesh dying when they touch fresh
water.
a large issuance from whatsoever
any emanation or implication made in
international waters.
a jail orange its navel compacted on all
sides
a mulberry in imagination
a pecan from the abandoned orchard
before they came for it a thousand of
these pecans
a buttery acorn grub body made of acorn
fat and untanning the acids a blonde
body of butter
a starving fall eating the worms that live
on outdoor weed, fried nightly
powdered skim milk poorly mixed
floating in slicks at room temperature
a slice of cold war wheat before he wakes
up, behind the couch
 an easter egg cookie laquered with blue
lake frosting, absconded with to bed for
12 nights consecutively
white balsamic poured onto sand

In Black Sun, Kristeva dismisses oceanic

feeling as a strategy by which women
may "gain a kind of protective
"At it best, oceanic feeling can, as
omnipotence by 'limitlessly spreading
Gérard de Nerval says, illuminate the
her constrained sorrow' to achieve a
"transparent network that covers the
'hallucinated completeness.'" (Wang 74)
world." (Wang, 2)
Writing towards an oceanic not
exhausted by Kristeva's definition, Wang
considers mystical feminine jouissance,
while not being outside of the symbolic,
to have a unique angle on it, "the
testimony of the mystics is a kind of trace
or symbolic remainder of the
experience." (Wang, 8) Marguerite
Porete, who may well fall in the category
of mystics Wang is referring to, alludes to
the problematic relationship between the
written and the oceanic, "For this is the
true purified kernel of divine Love which
is without creaturely matter and given by
the Creator to a creature and takes away
absolutely the practice of telling." (Porete,
chap. 18)

Catherine of Siena and other 'holy

anorexics' boldly stepped around the
church's chain of command, and claimed
the role of Christ's passionate bride
rather than virginal mother. Simone Weil,
on the other hand, positions herself in a
different place in the unfolding
interplay/threeway of passion, as that of
"I must withdraw so that G-d may
make contact with the beings whom
chance places in my path and whom
he loves. It is tactless for me to be
there. It is as though I were placed
between two lovers or two friends. I
am not the maiden who awaits her
betrothed, but the unwelcome third
who is with two betrothed lovers and
ought to go away so that they can
really be together." (Weil 1997, 88-9)
"G-d gave me Being in order that I
should give it back to him. It is like one
of those traps whereby the characters
are tested in fairy tales. If I accept this
gift it is bad and fatal; its virtue
becomes apparent through my refusal
of it. G-d allows me to exist outside
himself. It is for me to refuse this
interlocutor, a shadow cast in the way of
G-d taking joy in creation.
The crisis experienced by Weil could be
an interface with this "transparent
network," not a narcissistic false death to
ward off unbearable disintegration, but a
decreation of the atomic self. Weil
distinguishes between self-destruction
and decreation: "The relationship
between the body and the tool changes
during apprenticeship. We have to
change the relationship between our
body and the world. We do not become
detached, we change our attachment. We
must become attached to the all, to feel
the universe through each sensation.”
(Weill 1997, 141). Gustave Thibon
comments in his introduction to Gravity &
Grace, "Therein lies the tragedy of
degradation. Its is irreparable, not
because the self which it destroys is
precious, for the self is made to be
destroyed, but because it prevents G-d
from effecting the destruction himself
and robs eternalizing love of its prey."
(Thibon, 22) Integration or disorder does
not mirror destruction precisely. Simone
Weil considers death to be the most
precious thing given to man, and so
improper use of it to be a great tragedy.
In Weil's articulation, the mystical oceanic
is not a scene of controlled suicide, nor of
narrative slippage to firm up one's
reintegration, as described by Berlant
regarding a John Ashbery poem: "Does
the aesthetic moment of the different
autonomy they get when they exist
together in reverie become not a
authorization." (Weil 1997, 87)
Avoid the double shame of scholar
and the familiar. Give back to an
author a little of the joy, the energy,
the life of love and politics that he
knew how to give and invent." (Parnet
and Deleuze, 88)
condition for detaching from the market
but a condition of living in it, so that they
can think that who they really are are
people who can be lost in a moment?"
(Berlant, 34) These boys want jouissance/
they want pleasure in the self-shatter as
they build up fortified selves around the
idea that who they really are? Deep
down? Take the battery out of your
phone. Who I really am is...someone who
can get lost in a moment.
Instead, Weil's oceanic is concerned
with an expanding capacity for non-
individuating attachment, "All the things
that I see, hear, breathe, touch, eat; all the
beings I meet–the sum total of all I
deprive of contact with G-d, and I deprive
G-d of contact with all that, in so far as
something in me says "I." (Weil 1997, 88)
This is the sort of anorexic desire I am
interested in, a non-narcissistic slipping
out of oneself. In the epilogue to
Rudolph Bell's Holy Anorexia, William N.
Davis writes, "The point is, both holy
anorectics and those today express a
powerful urge to feel deeply, intensely...
connected in a way that is beyond the
abilities of most human relationships."
(Davis, 183) I do not intend to make of
Weil and idol, or to imitate her
methodology of embodiment. Her
brother Andre writes, "My sister did not
spend her life analyzing idolatry in order
to end up becoming an idol," (Yourgrau,
12) and to do so would violate the
respect due for the dead.

"To dwell in the absence of place does
not mean to transcend the body, but
to decreate the space of the body as
we know and feel it, along with the
space of “home” as contained, static,
and familiar. At stake is a perpetual
process of reformulating what bodies
can do. (Ledwell-Hunt, 95
"Women's consciousness erupts
through fissures in the socially
Deterretorialization as a form of
decreation. The alien and the anorexic
share a distancing from home,
represented by the food, the family.
"But to suggest that anorexia is an
invasion of the body (by either
ideological or alien force) is to buy into
the Cartesian mind-body scission and to
negate the fundamental quality of
"rootedness in the absence of place"
(Weil). Invasion and involution are
mutually exclusive." (Ledwell-Hunt, 100)
Not simply the alienation but the
vibrating quiet of rootedness in
alienation.
Kraus resented that Weil is seen as an
"anorexic philosopher" but Ledwell-Hunt
likes these grounds, is curious about what
it looks like to start here. Perhaps more of
a "philosopher of anorexia."
Weil, like a poorly vaccinated alien, is
seen as "Other and prophetic because ill-
equipped with the proper antibodies for
her altruistic panics." (Ledwell-Hunt, 100)
Simone was one of several Simones. Her
and de Beauvoir met but once, in a
courtyard, de Beauvoir wrote, "filled me
with admiration, [though] I could not
absorb her into my universe." (Yourgrau,
41) Apparently Weil looked Beauvior up
and down and said, "Well, it's clear
you've never gone hungry." (Yourgrau,
40)
What did not fit on the map, what could
knowable. Personal statements direct
from daily life, in which we say more
than we know, may be the primary
form in which such experiences exist
in social space: at this point they may
be their only accessible form."
(Mackinnon, xiii)
"It creates consciousness (in its guise
as pleasure memory) and its opposite
(inarticulateness), too. That is to say
the girls' relation to eating is a scene,
not a symptom: among other things,
the practice of eating provides a way
to negotiate one's incoherence while
not organizing a personality to
compensate for it." (Berlant, 135)
not be said but is circling hawklike is the
tubes forcing down the nose and sluicing
down the throat. The anecdotal is
orificial/is orifice and the erotics of the
anecdote demands the text to reconcile
with the uncanniness of the specific, the
erotics of the rim. The metal band ringing
the rim. Some scenes I find unbearable to
interface with without recourse in the
symbolic, Freudian representation. A
word of caution, of ration, from Deleuze,
"You have to keep enough of the
organism for it to reform each dawn; and
you have to keep small supplies of
significance and subjectification, if only to
turn them against their own systems
when the circumstances demand it, when
things, persons, even situations, force you
to; and you have to keep small rations of
subjectivity in sufficient quantity to
enable you to respond to the dominant
reality." (Deleuze 1987, 160)
The classic refrains about regressing oral
impregnation wishes, (and ensuing guilt),
about shrinking of groped flesh, these
are the supplies of significance that are
pocketed as crumbs, smuggled across
breaks as contraband.
A pleasure does not necessarily feel
good, but causes form to cohere. "The
pedagogy of repetition involves a shift in
the relation of content (the scene to
which one returns) to form (the pacing
and placement of one's attachment)."
(Berlant, 138) In this endless returning, to
to to to to, in the circling of the same
scenes, in staying in proximity, a rhythm

" starts to overshadow the objects of
She comments that "these bodily
memories are so unevenly submerged
and revealed, so distorted...that they
may as well be completely invented."
(Berlant, 132)
"
That is why a few vital anecdotes are
sufficient to produce a portrait of a
philosophy...It will be argued that
most philosophers' lives are very
bourgeois: but is not Kant's stocking-
suspender a vital anecdote
appropriate to the system of Reason?"
(Deleuze 1994, 72)
inheres in which the style of attachment
knowledge or memory themselves.
Berlant often wonders if "cruel optimism
is better than none at all." (Berlant, 16).
But of course, some optimisms are
crueler than others. Optimism is a space
to move across, a place to lend our
fantasies of sovereignty to for
safekeeping. (Berlant, 18)
"But the friendship did help to improve
Simone [Weil's] miserable diet. Dining
often with her friend's family, she should
be tricked by Dietz's...father, who would
go out of his way to declaim the
superiority of Judaism to the Christian
faith; while Weil was preoccupied with
launching her counter-reply, he would
slip some extra food onto her plate. She
never noticed." (Yourgrau, 96)
"[Domenica dal Paradiso] believed that "if
a man were to even touch her hand she
would instantly lose her virginity," and so
she she spent nine years jumping out of
windows and climbing over high walls to
avoid a young relative who lived under
their roof." (Bell, 163)

"These anecdotes do not refer simply
to social or even psychological types
of philosopher but show rather the
conceptual personae who inhabit
them. Possibilities of life or modes of
existence can be invented only on a
plane of immanence that develops the
power of conceptual personae. The
face and body of philosophers shelter
these personae who often give them a
strange appearance, especially in the
glance, as if someone else was looking
through their eyes. Vital anecdotes
recount a conceptual persona's
relationship with animals, plants, or
rocks, a relationship according to
which philosophers themselves
become something unexpected and
take on a tragic and comic dimension
that they could not have by
themselves. It is through our personae
that we philosophers become always
i wanted to write about the fall from
grace
i wanted to write about
i wanted to
there's not enough theoretical resources
within (u! s! a! str8) anarchy to survive as
a feminized fun-loving skeleton
i wanted to write
i wanted to write about the means of the
writing that i read
how every week i would submit
anonymously
and my housemates who ran the site
would rewrite and publish under their
names
how i never figured out encryption not
really
how my partner
came into his room wildeyed and said if
you think about it sex is eye contact sex is
fingers against finger webbing and sex is
hairs against pores
and his eyes were inches out of his skull
leaning towards me
and he was always eating smoked clams
out of the can
and drinking small cups of cream
and trying to get his mouth on my pores
i said i don't get it
and i didn't want to
and our housemates published baedan1
and i got a tattoo of the infinitely large
body of god attempting to pass through
an infinitely tight moment in time
and i don't know whether he was
reporting back to me on what he had
heard
or if he had started the whole orifice and
something else and are reborn as
public garden or zoo." (Deleuze 1994,
73)
phallus talk in the first place
but either way our housemates asked
about the yelling and the slamming
and he said we're just falling in love
which was the first i'd heard about it
his bed was in a closet and he wouldn't
let me out until i told him
he liked to massage my organs until i
threw up laugh and say i can't believe i
can do that
shaking his head holding my ankle i'd roll
over and throw up on his carpet
until one night everyone was at a new
squat
and his massage table was stolen
nothing else in the house was missing
assuredly some primie bros from tacoma
with grappling hooks
and army surplus sweaters
soft-civ digital camo
and foundation over spidering scars
and nobody knew how they got it out the
window
i smiled
the house had only been empty for an
hour over the night
but their relatively large bodies had
slipped through a loose hole in time
no more of him asking girls with
endometriosis over
to practice
Catherine of Siena regularly called Pope
Gregory "Daddy," and her "Sweetest
Daddy" (Bell, 34)
"The action of the musculature of the
intestines is not that of passive
substrate awaiting the animating
influence of the unconscious but,
rather, that of an interested broker of
psychosomatic events." (Wilson, 53)
"What is the biological nature of the
drive before it makes contact with the
external world? The search for a
starting point to object relationality
presumes that there are biological
processes (hunger, for example) that
have not yet been brought under the
sway of phantasy. These debates
usually presume that psychic action is
a secondary elaboration of prior
(purely?) biological stimuli. Here I
would like...to dissolve the idea that
there is a developmental point before
which biology is not minded." (Wilson,
39)
The aim is inherent in the impulse itself.
One does not seek to devour because
one has seen devouring and imagines it
will produce indistinction with the
devoured object, but because that is how
the muscles of the jaw articulate a will to
destroy.
t h a l a s s a
This is what Ferenczi identifies as the
thalassal trend. Ontogenetic inclinations
are defined by Ferenczi as the desire to
return to the womb, phylogenetic
tendencies are defined as "the desire of
all creatures to return to the water."
(Wilson, 106). As Ferenczi claims, the
birth of all land-faring creatures out of the
seas is ontogenetically traumatic in a
manner mirroring the individual trauma
of birth. These trends are latent in all
tissue but are often stimulated by
heightened state of what he articulates as
'psychopathology,' or when the 'normal'
psychic structures have been destroyed
by trauma. "In such moments, when the
psychic system fails, the organism begins
to think." (Ferenczi, 6)
Ferenczi identifies this "hysterically
reacting body" as being composed of
semi-fluid, semi-substances that have
partially redissolved into a psychic state,
and change their structure and function
and thereby express wishes and
repulsions, thoughts, et al. (Ferenczi, 6)
This cross-classed or cross-phylum
amphimixis is echoed in Janis Ledwell-
Hunt's studies of anorexic memoir and
'pro-ana' platforms, "A frequent motif
appearing across literatures of anorexia,
and especially present in the utterances of
self-starvers, is the human body’s non-
mammalian transformation. Very seldom
do I come across an anorexic who testifies
to her emaciated body’s resemblance to a
boy’s or man’s." (Ledwell-Hunt, 264)
This is not so much psychosexual
regression as perhaps what Deleuze and
Guattari identify as involution, "not
regression at all, but involution, involuted
body." (Parnet & Deleuze, 81) Drawing up
into the ontogenetic potential of one's
egg body, a direction different than
common speculations about the
androgynous aims of feminized anorexics.
Wilson, reading bulimic memoirs
in which narrators develop the capacity
to vomit at will, articulates this as a fluid
regression to "primevality in which
peristalsis and antiperistalsis were
mediated by the same digestive tube."
(Ferenczi 1924) The tissues of the larynx
and pharnyx are psychically alive and
have become active in becoming-worm,
in an experiment of antiperistalsis, in
which the alimentary tract enacts object
relations rather than provide the
substratum upon which to project these
relations. This conceptualization situates
itself at a theoretical aporia within
Freudian psychoanalysis- that is, what is
happening, from the perspective of tissue
states, at the "jump," or in the "break" of
hysterical conversion. Importantly, in this
pharynx-larynyx-antiperistalsis scene, to
paraphrase Ledwell-Hunt, relations

"Experience of the transcendent: This
seems contradictory, and yet the
transcendent can be known only
through contact, since our faculties are
unable to invent it." (Weil 1997, 175)
"What a strange confusion–that of void
with lack." (Parnet & Deleuze, 67)
"between" the head and the gut are
formed or elaborated, in this disordered
eating, rather than split.
Julia Bebbington Babb paints a cruciform
image of the vertical/transcendent and
the horizontal/immanent to "in order to
reveal the possibility of redemption that
is contained in their paradoxical
intersection;" (Babb, 12) "Indeed, as Luce
Irigaray argues, ‘why do we assume that
God must always remain an inaccessible
transcendence rather than a realisation –
here and now – in and through the
body?’" (Irigaray 1993,148) Irigaray calls
this the "sensible transcendent." Mystical
mediation on the form of the trinity might
lead one out of the specular anorexic
paradigm of immanent versus
transcendent. "The Trinitarian space
comes into view as a massive, fleshy
space; a space of desire and hunger for
the other..." (Bacon, 323)
Anorexics are greedily consuming G-d
food
One guiding question, one way out of
the postulation of etiology, is to echo
Spinoza via Deleuze, What can an
anorexic body do? Ditto celibacy, ditto
hysteria. If the phenomena described by
these words can be considered to be
attempts at constitutions of Bodies
Without Organs, Deleuze and Guattari
maintain, "for each type of BwO we must
ask: (1) what type is it, how is it fabricated,

"There is politics as soon as there is a
continuum of intensities (anorexic void
and fullness), emission and conquest
of food particles (constitution of a
body without organs, in opposition to
a dietary or organic regime), and
above all combination of fluxes (the
food flux enters into relation with a
clothes flux, a flux of language, a flux
of sexuality: a whole, molecular
woman-becoming in the anorexic,
whether man or woman)" (Deleuze
and Parnet, 82)
Melancholia, like mourning, is a
healing process that only 'appears
pathological because the process of
grief...takes a detour through the
body'...the anorexic body, therefore,
far from 'pathological' or
'disembodied,' testifies to an 'acting
by what procedures and means
(predetermining what will come to pass)?
(2) What are its modes, what comes to
pass, and with what variants and what
surprises, what is unexpected and what
expected?" (Deleuze 1987, 152)
Anorexia, (like SCUM) will never be a call
to march, but describes a dispersal of
'micro-politics,' "infinitesimal,
microscopic negotiations of their
empirical existentiality." (Haver 282)
This is not to reactively aggrandize
"disorderly eating." (Ledwell-Hunt)
Wilson warns about this in her reading of
Depression: A Public Feeling, "In making
depressive feelings valuable, Cvetkovich
takes from them their distinctive,
elemental destructiveness; in so doing,
she aggresses against the very character
of the bad feeling she claims to hold
dear." (Wilson, 86) We aggress upon our
objects by disavowing their ambivalence.
While I am specifically attempting to take
a non-traditionally psychoanalytic
approach to thinking through disorderly
eating, I am inspired by Wilson's attention
to the originary ambivalence of
melancholia, that is, ambivalence is the
environment in which melancholic
responses take root, it is not produced by
loss of an object. "In either case, this is no
longer a picture of righteous (and
conscious) anger gone astray. Rather,
melancholic responses to loss are often
malicious and usually impossible to like.
This a scene of intense bitterness–
simultaneously painful and enjoyable."
out' of gender's unlivability precisely
in order to go on living." (Brain 164)
" It was such a hostile thing for her to
do, is how an artist friend described
the recent suicide of another. And
there you have it: you might think by
cutting your wrists or hanging yourself
by a sash from the edge of a loft bed
that you will be finally free of the
endless interpretability of your actions,
the coded behaviour of female
America in which every move you
make can only possibly be a
calculation of the effect you'll have on
others, a sly cipher in the grand
manipulative project that is the only
life you'll ever know, but you'll be
wrong. Even in death you won't be
free." (Kraus 2014, 1)
(Wilson, 75) (the tactile pleasure of
sucking in a hollowed stomach/ the smile
of the ruminating infant.) In this reading
that Wilson is attempting to complicate,
self-destruction is a misdirected anger
that can cynically be utilized by certain
feminisms to attempt to force hostility to
bend towards the "good". I am looking
for ways to talk about anorexia and its
affects that "enable them to resist, on the
one hand, their reduction to mere
expressions of class ressentiment, and on
the other, their counter-valorization as
therapeutic "solutions" to the problems
they highlight and condense." (Ngai
2007, 3)
Chris Kraus writes in Aliens and Anorexia,
“Impossible to accept the self-destruction
of a woman as strategic.” The strategy I
take up here is not the political strategy
that entraps anorexia in a strictly visual
and representative paradigm, and tends
to fail its own ends of recovery, but
strategic in the sense of noting the
conditions and affects of the building of
anorexic assemblages. "...So that we
might explore anorexic acts rather than
only its etiologies and significations."
(Ledwell-Hunt, 11)
In her thesis, 'Anorexic Affect: Disordered
Eating and the Conative Body', Janis
Ledwell-Hunt notes how feminist social-
constructivist writing on anorexia
reinscribes social pathologization in the
same motion of destabilizing medical
pathologization. In this inscription, victims
of "reading disorders," anorexics fail to
 avoid drastically internalizing and
enacting toxic messaging that the rest of
us intellectually "know" is manipulative,
and manage accordingly to varying
degrees of success. Ledwell-Hunt takes
the lethality of anorexic experiments and
the tendency of the "anorexic
assemblage [to] come so close to going
off the rails," (Deleuze & Parnet, 82) as an
impetus to exploration, rather than
avoidance.
"There is nothing 'glamorous' or 'lovely'
"The test of desire: not denouncing
about this visceral economy of anorexic
false desires, but distinguishing within
expenditure, but there is something
desire between that which pertains to
intricate, affective, and experimental, and
striatic proliferation, or else too-violent
while such an uncovering of
destratification, and that which
desiring/hungering in anorexia might run
pertains to the construction of the
the risk of 'triggering' people to attempt
plane of consistency (keep an eye out
self-starvation, it also offers the potential
for all that is fascist, even inside us,
to entice self-starvers to try something
and also for the suicidal and the
new. There are different sorts of
demented)." (Deleuze 1987, 165)
'triggering' momentums we ought to
consider." (Ledwell-Hunt, 34-5) To take
seriously the experiment, its
assemblages, its fields of desire, is not to
advocate anorexia but might lead to less-
lethal openings.
So what are the risks, pleasures,
possibilities, desires within the
experiment of anorexia?
In a close reading of 'Dead
Psychoanalysis' in Dialogues II, Branka
Arsic explores what modal intensities the
'anorexic cook-model' experiments with,
and what manners compromise the
signifying logic of "anorexic elegance."
Rather than prescribed etiquette,

The goal is not to reject food, but to
exhaust the possible uses of food, and
the spaces that (not) eating can
occupy or occasion. (Ledwell-Hunt,
69)
manners in this sense are
apprenticeships in bodily comportment,
manner-by-which as much as manners-
minded. "Manners are unsettling
because, says Emerson, they are the
effect of a momentous 'fine perception'
that registers what passes as
imperceptible for everybody
else...manneristic living is an experiment
in the impersonal, in the diminution of
the 'I' that gives way to an intensified life.
It is precisely with such a way of being
that the anorexic-model conducts its
experiments." (Arsic, 44) These manners,
especially that of the peripatetic cook
discussed by Deleuze and Parnet, are
commonly coded as strict regimentation
or the theatrical over-investment in
gendered norms (a woman cooks for
others but lives on crumbs, a woman is
miraculously nourished by taking care of
others,) but may also open onto other
possibilities. Meunier, writing on heavy
S&M, "It remains an experiment because
the scene entered into remains bound to
an individual and his or her specific
context. But the more rigid the rules, the
more minimal the possibilities for
variation, making self-observation easier.
The less one seems to appear in what
one does - the smaller the stakes - the
greater the risk of delivering oneself to
something overwhelming. More is
expressed here than a merely instinctive
obedience to prevailing standards and
expectations. The exclusion of subjective,
contingent gestures bespeaks a need - or
amounts to an attempt - to disrupt those
 gestures' hidden correlation to certain
norms. To submit to extreme rules can
also be an expression of withdrawing
from the false option of a free speech."
(Meunier, 84-5) This is not an attempt to
map these comportments into a
hegemonic/subversive paradigm but to
be unsettled by manners, to allow for a
moment's space between gestures and
symbolism, to make a moment within
"free speech" for the possibility of
silence.

In browsing various pro-ana blogs and

"Does living near them make you
forums, specifically the unending amount
sleepy? Do they increase or stifle your
of 'thinspiration' media produced and
appetite? When you make a statement
disseminated, (one wakes up hungover
natural to your body of knowledge, do
from scrolling through these,) I'm
they contradict or compound it,
reminded of Sianne Ngai's writing about
forcing you to ingest new knowledge
envy as a feminized hostility. Ngai
that has not been tested for safety? If
attempts to drive a small wedge between
your answer to any of these
identification (fantasy) and mimesis
statements is "maybe" or "yes,: then
(activity) to show that an object of
your loved one may be SEVERELY BUT
emulation can "exemplify a standard that
NOT IRREPARABLY DUPLICATE."
cannot be positively defined or located–
(Kleeman, 142)
that has no ontological coherence or
consistency–prior to its exemplification."
(Ngai 2007, 160) I don't identify with her
and want to be like her, I don't want her
to be like me, I want what she lacks
presently but what emulation produces,
nonsingularity. The emulated object is
transformed in its emulation, if in no
other way, it is transformed into
something capable of being emulated,
"...the proximity between identification
and mimesis increases because the

"To repeat the question once more, is
hunger an attempt to forego and
numb the material needs of the
organism, or is hungering a way to tap
into them, to continually experience
the vicissitudes of a body moving and
being moved by the material world?"
(Ledwell-Hunt, 199)
"If pleasure is not the norm of desire, it
is not by virtue of a lack that is
impossible to fill but, on the contrary,
by virtue of its positivity," (Deleuze
1987, 157)
"examples" within these examples–the
models providing the fashion after which
the subjects "remold" themselves–
increase in their capacity to encourage or
induce emulation. The more feminine the
example, the more exemplary the
example. As if femininity itself were a
hyperbolic mode of exemplarity?" (Ibid,
149)
Emptying to conjure a new feeling, eating
to remain in hunger. Elaborate food-play
seems hardly a food refusal but an
elaboration. Does the practice of cutting
food into 32 equal pieces or eating a
yogurt over the course of an afternoon
ring of a lack of appetite or a disinterest
in food? Anorexia produces strange time
logics, distorting meal-time, productive
time-wasting, productive precisely
because in this time, nothing is done,
eating is delayed. Hysteria makes loops
in time, repetition until the originary
event drops out of the middle, celibates
are given the gift of time, set adrift in
certain ways, perhaps alchemically
transforming the body to undermine
imagined futures.
"Such beauty in the lack of ducts or
orifices, unitary and complete, impossible
to feed it or cause it pain. A pasture full of
veal cutlets sitting under the sun, looking
eyelessly up." (Kleeman 27)
A lot of etiologies of anorexia describe it
as the futile attempt to occupy the

"The Hebrew Bible is filled with such
stories. Can such a tradition recognize
as divine the life of a 'loser,' like Christ,
who, in the process of getting himself
killed, freed no one?" (Yourgrau, 145)
"G-d does not colonize the space of
creation but beckons creation to be."
(Bacon 323)
position of a masculine subject- either by
creating a harder, flatter body, or by
exercising control/ domination/
sovereignty. This does not jam the
machinery of objectification/
subjectification but generalizes its terms.
Luce Irigaray suggests there is no
vocabulary of feminized agency, and this
symbolic aporia produces two splits
regarding anorexia- either they are
helpless victims (the only remedy would
be the destruction of patriarchy) or that
they rally against their castration, ironic
embodiment, pathetic but intelligible
protest. "Irigaray’s “manner of recasting
all economy” (Irigaray 1985, 145) is to
first expose a void (the hole of men’s
signifying systems) and to traverse this
emptiness by exposing the limitations of
maligning this void as possessing no-
thing(s)." (Ledwell-Hunt, 224-5). One such
emptiness to be traversed is anorexic
hunger. I don't throw my weight
completely behind the desirability of
proliferating vocabulary, but Ledwell-
Hunt implies that developing a
conceptual vocabulary by which to
describe anorexic desire has parallel
implications to developing one for
feminized desire, for voids without lack,
for replete emptinesses, that are
evacuated to call something new into
being. I'm reminded again of Berlant's
focus on reprieve, "to negotiate one's
incoherence while not organizing a
personality to compensate for it."
(Berlant, 135)
Perhaps it is not necessarily a problem

"Pulling her own thighs apart,
suggestively, seductively, so that she
can pinch what she deems her excess
skin strikes me as an eroticization of
the void. Literally, she longs to create
more absent space between her legs.
She wants to make her holes bigger in
absolute terror that they should be re-
filled. This is a libidinal investment, and
while it is possible that Hornbacher’s
terror of fat arises from her female
indoctrination within the specular
economy, it is also possible that her
self- starvation occasions a process of
feeling her way into a different system
of values in which the no-thing is
privileged, aroused, and explored."
(Ledwell-Hunt, 253)
"Replete emptiness threatens
processes of producing, reproducing,
representing, and signifying because it
is space that does not exist to be filled
with some thing." (Ledwell-Hunt, 225)
that feminized subjects have been over-
identified with embodiment, and perhaps
certain cancerous anorexic BwO's insist
only on the masculine right to deman the
illusion of bodily escape, but instead
what should be escaped or explored is
what exactly that identification with
embodiment is supposed to imply, what
those bodies are supposed to do.
if not, then
if not a tragic avoidance of femininity,
then perhaps an empathic tool
if not a desperate plea for attention, then
perhaps an interrogation of food
Vaginal lips/ staring down the barrel of
one's own arm/ anorexic self-touching, as
perpetually self-encountering
assemblage, as auto-erotic relation of the
interplay of surfaces. There is the textural
surface and the representational surface,
the latter implies depth and operates by
metaphor, the former is a constellation of
potential connectivities that can
sometimes be expanded through
strategies of emptying, voiding that
anticipates coming sensation or new
sense events.
As Linda Stupart proposes in ' Chris Kraus
and the Empathetic Exchange of
Objects,' chafes against the idea that
subjectification is the only enabling
direction to head in. She advocates for an
empathetic exchange among objects, "I

Affective anorexia spilling open
ecstatically ideal/real everywhere.
Sianne Ngai, reading Music for Porn,
hopes to forestall of the theoretical
tendency to search for a nugget of
meaning at the core of every
abstraction. Marx inverted this flow,
the concrete is a wildly dense and
complicated form and admixture of
enabling abstractions. Ngai reminds
us that an abstraction cohering around
nothing and a substance congealing
around nothing are both sensible,
existent phenomena. (Ngai, 2014)
"If treated medically, they follow the
feeding protocol intended for post-
Holocaust rehabilitation. This is one of
the vicissitudes of self-starvation. This
is a material practice that literally
shapes anorexic embodiment."
(Ledwell-Hunt, 25)
find that it excites them suitably, my
animated corpse. This, surely, though is
not the only fun that I, that we, can have
with being dead? The only constitutive
possibility for an already-objectified
feminine?" (Stupart, 93)
she does weird things with food.
This 'blind spot' of the specular economy
as potential. Brian Massumi's BwI (Body
Without Image,) an elaboration on the
BwO, in Parables for the Virtual, is a
proprioceptive intervention in refrains of
body image and anorexia. Body images
are only ever based on stills, and BwI's
are only perceived in movement, namely
they describe blind spots within the
imaginary. To exploit these blind spots
without filling them in.
Weil dying of tubercular starvation, and
refusing any food beyond standard
French war rations.
My father raised on ersatz german war
rations, me too, powdered milk, imposing
bricks of shredded wheat. When was the
first time you tasted milkfat. The feeding
tubes and dietetics. Writing about
anorexia is replete with references to
'Aushwitz,' et al, "you look like," "she
looked like," Ancel Keys' Minnesota
Starvation Study, produced cookbook
looky-loos, produced fine men, with an

"In this scene, activity toward
reproducing life is neither identical to
making it or oneself better nor a
mimetic response to the structural
conditions of a collective failure to
thrive, nor just a mini-vacation from
being responsible–such activity is also
directed toward toward making a less-
bad experience. It's a relief, a reprieve,
not a repair." (Berlant 117)
They are visual forms lived at the level
of organization, but motivated by a
very simple mechanism: to feel the
world a little less unfavorably...(Kusch
168)
eye towards refeeding concentration
camp survivors. Keys' refeeding guide is
still the protocol used by hospitals for
self-starvers.
i wanted to write
i wanted to write about
becoming-anorexic becoming-hysterical
becoming-celibate
i wanted to cultivate disaffection
a disaffected approach to the material
anecdotal without being sentimental
because what i am fascinated with is girls
who take the implications over-seriously
of the things they read
girls whose minds are snapped like twigs
in conversations
girls who think they can read minds
who know they can
but to meet it out there rather than
dragging it all towards me
consuming it all in order to throw it up
to push the pleasant towards obscenity
by pure plenitude
girls who have to either explode through
a logic of nothingness or a logic of
infinity
to write about what it is that i find
intolerable
to find a way out there was to be a way
out of the fantasy of escape
a something worth the trouble of
destroying it
a slutty celibacy
a celibate dykeness

"As an alternative to the confessional
model candour is no less
performative, but it may work against
the identifying moment of admission,
preferring the disidentifying force of
forthright speaking out as well as to
set the story in motion by telling and
sharing it and not pinning it down to
one person and their feelings of guilt."
(Meunier, 81)
"If, as Carol Lazarro-Weis writes of
Italian feminist authors, the
confessional mode allows 'an analysis
of their own myths of wholeness and
integrity', the anti-confessional might
allow anti-mythical selves to be
produced. And if the confession
displays how identity is social,
communal, or political, the anti-
confession - as exhibited in Kraus'
work - is a means to dissolve and
redistribute identity across these
social, communal, or political bodies."
(Morris, 117)
a greasy anorexia
the semantic slip letting go less gracefully
into the trade in signifiers
grabbing onto something
just to leave marks on it
that why would sex mediate rather than
exacerbate the intolerability of gendered
life
the spatiality of rape and sex is not a
gradation or a spectrum
is not a definitional other
is constitutive is the activity that allowed
activities now called sex to produce value
academics are sad because they don't
work for g-d no more
Formally concerned with candor and
confession- can one get better at
unproducing guilt, unproducing
transgression, with the nothing-changes?
h i s t r i o n i c
perhaps there are experiments left
unattempted
perhaps left half-formed
and can angle arced through time
like a family man's arm swinging wide for
a christmas handshake
there are still things to be tried
it is unlivable
here on the edge of the internet
where all is funneled into new identity
where the norm is rapidly expanding
and the means of its enforcement
unchanged
where shame is rooted out and exposed
where supposedly truths lie everywhere
where nothing can be conserved
or allowed to be hidden
or rest
for a moment
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A cartography and never a symbolics
Deleuze & Parnet, Dialogues II, 111

playing dungeons and dragons with a dry-erase

board between us, the action is happening at the level of
narrative but the map has real consequences- range of
weapon range of spell, complicated calcula for height of
sphere-shaped incantations

experiments with cartographic doodles/ what D&D boards

of different phenomena might be sketched out as
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brokendistro@riseup.net