So Much Wasted

Patrick Anderson looks at self-starvation as a way of making political claims within three settings: the medical clinic, the art gallery, and the prison. He focuses on people who refuse food for different reasons and on the cultural and political conditions that shape those choices. The book traces how anorexia nervosa came to be diagnosed, considers fasting performances by artists such as Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramović, and examines a hunger strike carried out by Turkish prisoners.

Anderson asks what happens in each of these places when a person performs a refusal to eat as a form of opposition or withdrawal. He argues that self-starvation, which aims at death even when the person does not consciously intend it, generates violence, suffering, disappearance, and loss in ways that differ from other forms of protest. Working with thinkers including Martin Heidegger, Sigmund Freud, Giorgio Agamben, and Peggy Phelan, he explores how the self-starving subject takes shape against institutional and ideological pressures, including those of the state.

At the center of the book is what Anderson calls the "politics of morbidity." He presents the embodied, deliberate engagement with mortality and disappearance not as purely destructive but as a productive staging of selfhood, one in which subject and object, presence and absence, and life and death are bound together.