Bite Your Friends
Stories of the Body Militant
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
At once a subversive autobiography of a mercurial woman and a mesmerizing history of the body as a site of resistance to power.
“I bite my friends to heal them.”—Diogenes the Cynic, c. 350 BCE
From a Roman amphitheater where 4th century martyrs are fed to wild beasts to the S&M leather bars of New York in the 1970s, this sinuous and illuminating book by novelist and cultural critic Fernanda Eberstadt explore the lives of uncommonly brave men and women—saints, philosophers, artists--who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society’s mores and entrenched power structures.
The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes who lived “a dog’s life,” sleeping, teaching, having sex in the public square; Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, two early Christian martyrs; twentieth-century prophets of bodily freedom like filmmaker-poet Pier Paolo Pasolini and philosopher Michel Foucault; Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot; the political artist Piotr Pavlensky, who nailed his s*****m to the pavement of Red Square to protest Vladimir Putin’s tyranny; these are the outrageous, uncommon, but deeply committed activists featured through original interviews and careful case studies in Eberstadt’s immensely readable book, which is part political treatise, part manifesto, part memoir.
Running through her narrative of the Body Militant is Eberstadt’s own story and the story of her mother, a New York writer and glamor figure of the 1960s, whose illness-scarred body first led Eberstadt to seek connections between beauty, belief, and the truths taught through the body.
Eberstadt asks crucial questions for our time: what drives certain individuals to risk pain, disgrace, even death, in the name of freedom? And, what can we learn from their example to become braver ourselves?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This studious meditation from novelist Eberstadt (Rat) "tells the lives of certain saints, artists, and philosophers whose bodies became sites of resistance to the world as-it-is." She explores how philosopher Michel Foucault's homosexuality made him the target of state violence (he was once beaten by Tunisian police who found him driving with a male sexual partner) and how while teaching at UC Berkeley in the 1970s he embraced San Francisco's sadomasochistic subculture, believing its anonymity provided freedom from identity, which he viewed as "a reflection of the state's... control over the individual." Eberstadt commends the "self-mastery" of Russian performance artist Piotr Pavlensky (whose work protests the Russian state through public self-mutilation; he once nailed his scrotum to the ground in Moscow's Red Square), but wonders whether the "huge fun" had by Pussy Riot during their protests offers a more enticing strategy for engaging civilians in collective action. Elsewhere, she discusses how fourth-century Greek philosopher Diogenes lived on the street to assert that "the only path to freedom in self-degradation" and how Perpetua, a third-century North African Christian martyr, remained defiant in her faith even as she faced execution for refusing to "sacrifice to the Roman gods." The diverse stories of Eberstadt's subjects illuminate the complex ways in which bodies can constitute contested political terrain. Incisive and philosophical, this intrigues.