Sottrazione e dissoluzione del Sé. Digiuno e rinuncia in Life & Times of Michael K

Abstract

asting is a simple, yet radical act. In a cultural horizon built on the incessant ingestion of signs, commodities and words, the abstention from nourishment can become a form of symbolic and political opposition. This essay explores such a gesture not as an ascetic practice or clinical symptom, but rather as an alternative grammar of action. The body that withdraws from food disarticulates the codes of power and production, generating meaning through absence. At the heart of the analysis lies Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, in which the protagonist, refusing nourishment and imposed care, performs an act of bodily disobedience that undermines the biopolitical and necropolitical order. Fasting thus becomes an ontological act, a poetics of refusal, a liminal practice of emancipation and of the body’s resistance to every dogma that would seek to tame it