Il corpo e Deleuze

Mutant Spiritualities in a Secular Age: The 'Fasting Body' and the Hunger for Pure ImmanenceAuthor(s): Jo NashSource: Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 310-327Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27512941 .

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Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 45, No. 3, Fall 2006 (? 2006) DOI: 10.1007/sl0943-006-9035-8

Mutant Spiritualities in a Secular Age:

The Tasting Body' and the Hunger for Pure Immanence

JO NASH

ABSTRACT: This article will explore the 'return of the repressed' of secular materialism, in the

form of 'mutant spiritualities', with a particular focus on the significance of the fasting body, once

an accepted product of ascetic spiritual practice, and now cultivated by those seeking a range of

experiences; including the anorexic, the model or celebrity trading in beauty and elegance, and

those in search of a new age spiritual enlightenment. I argue that further exploration of the range of contexts in which the fasting body is cultivated reveal that what is desired is a lost experience of

the body as an expanded field of energetic confluences, an assemblage of aects in the manner of

Deleuze and Guattari's 'body without organs'. Such an experience of the body is termed as

expanded, light and even ecstatic by those following fasting regimes, in that it overcomes the

experience of the body as 'heavy', burdensome or limiting. The word ecstasy derives from the

Greek 'ekstasis', meaning to stand outside oneself. Through a textual analysis of web content of

cyber communities dedicated to these food practices, I suggest that fasting expresses a hunger for

'self transcendence' as pure immanence, that is both subversive of secular materialism and limited

by narcissistic pathology.

KEY WORDS: fasting; spirituality; ecstasy; Deleuze; psychoanalysis.

Introduction

This article will explore what I propose is the 'return of the repressed' of

secular materialism, in the form of 'mutant spiritualities', with a particular

Jo Nash, PGDip Ed, PhD (Psychotherapy Studies), MA., BA (Hons) has taught on the Masters in Psychoanalytic Studies at the University of Sheffield since 1998 and became Course Director in

October 2001. Before becoming an academic she worked in mental health services for over

15 years as a student nurse, social worker, advocate, trainer and researcher. She is currently

working on a series of essays on the application of psychodynamic theory to the study of social

processes, in relation to new spiritualities, religion and political processes, and gender and mental

health. Correspondence to Dr Jo Nash, Mental Health Section, School of Health and Related

Research, University of Sheffield. Regent Court, 30 Regent Place, Sheffield, UK: SI 4DA. [email protected].

310 ? 2006 Blanton-Peale Institute



Jo Nash 311

focus on the significance of the fasting body, once a product of ascetic spiritual

practice (Walker-Bynum, 1987), and now cultivated by those seeking a range of experiences; including the anorexic, the model or celebrity trading in beauty and elegance, and those in search of a new age spiritual enlightenment. I will

argue that further exploration of the range of contexts in which the fasting

body is cultivated reveal that what is desired is a lost experience of the body as

an expanded affective field of confluences, (Deleuze & Guattari, 1971, 1980)

rather than as alienated, limited and burdensome.

It is a matter of interest that the communities of people involved in these

practices choose to communicate primarily via the web, using computer mediated technologies that prevent the physical presentation of the repellent emaciated body. In that sense the disembodied networks of communication

surrounding these practices further enhance opportunities for those involved

to sustain socially marginal behaviour that may otherwise invite censure,

rejection, or judgement in a face to face setting. However, I do not wish to

dwell upon the social dynamics of the cyber community, or the social pre sentation of the 'cyberself in this essay. Here I am primarily interested in the

meaning making processes at work in these communities of like minded

individuals who share their desires, values, experiences to sustain their

commitment to extreme, and socially marginal, food practices. I suggest, that

through an exploratory textual analysis of the hypertexts produced by cyber communities dedicated to these practices, we can observe how fasting enables

this shift in existential experience towards the body as an energy field, an

assemblage of affects in the manner of Deleuze and Guattari's 'body without

organs' or BwO (1971), rather than a discrete, boundaried corporeal entity. Such an experience of the body is termed as expanded, light and even

ecstatic by those following fasting regimes (Rahn, 1928; Wulff, 1997), in that it overcomes the experience of the body as 'heavy', burdensome or limiting. The

word ecstasy derives from 'ekstasis', a Greek word meaning to stand outside

oneself. It is this desire for 'self transcendence' involving the dissolution of

boundaries between inner and outer, body and mind (and the proliferating dualisms attendant on this primary existential split) that is sought, I suggest,

by those engaged in extreme fasting practices. During fasting, the experience of the body in time and space is altered so one becomes predominantly located in the present moment. What is desired is what Deleuze called an experience

of'pure immanence' (Deleuze, 1995), a sense of lightness and being at one with

the here and now, which is usually reserved for the contemplatively gifted amongst us. This is why fasting has been advocated by many religions as a

means of enhancing meditation and contemplative prayer practice, by pro

moting a sense of attentiveness to the present which is inevitable if we are

battling with hunger (Rahn, 1928). I will also explore how the fasting body has become a site for the cultural

inscription of a depleted and starved inner life characteristic of narcissistic

functioning (Symington, 1993, 1998), such that the exterior body image, or



312 Journal of Religion and Health

corporeal surface has usurped the inner world of affect, cognition and lan

guage as a signifier and a chosen vehicle of self-expression (Kirkby, 1997).

Body dysmorphia is an emerging psychosomatic pathology particular to the

postmodern West (Thompson et al., 2004). In this paper I suggest that when

words fail to communicate our alienation, fragmentation, disintegration, then our feelings about, and experiences of, our bodies write these dissatisfactions

large, through the cultural inscription of body enhancement practices as a

means of mediating affect and intersubjective experience. This includes

depriving the body of food and/or over exercising to satisfy the hunger for a

'pure immanence' (Deleuze, 1995) inscribed in the lines of flight that map out

the desirability of the 'fasting body'. In political terms the fasting body is also a

site of resistance to the cultural hegemony of the consumption ethic, sub

verting the imperative to ingest, process and excrete as a primary cultural or

natural activity in what Kroker calls our 'excremental' post modern West

(Kroker & Cook, 1986). The fasting body writes large a paradox at the heart of

Western culture that is obsessed with weight control and yet driven by excess

consumption. It is at once a powerful symbol of the human ability to resist

hegemonic inscriptions of desire, in this case the consumption ethic, and yet it

also acquiesces in the received inscription of 'thinness' as Western culture's

ideal of the body beautiful. The fasting body writes large this cultural paradox of consumption and control through the transformation of the constitutive

affects from inside out, to create a body-without-organs, a body that becomes

much more than the sum of its parts. This body signifies a subjectivity that

exceeds and subverts the confines and limits of language, by defying yet also

inscribing culturally dominant desires, through the wordless cipher of the

'telling flesh' (Kirkby, 1997). I also wish to use psychoanalytic ideas to approach an understanding of the

emergence of the fasting body as a dominant aesthetic, by which I mean a

striving for a sublime subjective affective experience as well as the achieve

ment of a particular aesthetic form. To do this I will review the cultural sig nificance of the ancient spiritual practice of fasting for westerners, (which remains an accepted spiritual practice in the main world religions of Judaism,

Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism) through the historical work of Walker

Bynum (1987). This article will explore the psychology of such a practice, and

how this has mutated under secularisation through a process of dualistic

polarisation, into what has been reconstructed as a health denying practice or

pathology, known as anorexia; and a practice of health benefit, such as dietic

cleansing or health fasting, the extreme end of which is based upon a yogic inedia called 'breatharianism' or living on light' (Jasmuheen, 1998). I will

suggest that voluntary inedias have been transformed through a process of

secularisation, into a polarised set of food practices that have been socially reconstructed as both pathological and curative. It will also be argued that it is

the social reconstruction of fasting as a new age health/spiritual practice that

enables it to be construed as 'other' to anorexia, not as an eating disorder, but



Jo Nash 313

as a reordered food practice, of health benefit to adherents. As such, I argue that these voluntary inedias exist on a continuum of pathological to curative

'mutant spiritualities', inscribed in the flesh of the fasting body. In exploring the psychology of these voluntary inedias I wish to try and

answer the following primary question. Is there any commonality of experi

ence, in terms of goals and objectives, involved in the various forms of fasting that can help trace a lineage of desire to overcome hunger, from the ancient

ascetic cross-cultural religious practice, to a polarised set of diseased and

curative, yet secularised, food practices today? I propose that the use of Deleuzian theory, in conjunction with Bipnian ideas

(Bion, 1967,1970) will aid an exploration of how this secularisation of spiritual

practices takes place. I want to use Deleuze and Guattarri's concepts to per form a preliminary theoretical exploration of the health denying pathology of

fasting known as anorexia and the health enhancing therapy of fasting

adopted by breatharians. I will also be exploring what this might mean in the

context of advanced western societies increasingly obsessed by the role of food

in the construction of body image, particularly in relation to size, beauty and

ageing, existing alongside the persistent problem of world hunger.

Mind, body and spiritual fasting: from Freud to Deleuze

In a post-Nietschean age, now that 'God is dead' as the arbiter of truth, and

the measure of all things, Deleuze and Guattarri show us how Freud substi

tutes the triune Judao-Christian godhead with the triangular constellation of

Oedipus (Freud, S. 1915-17), with what they call the 'holy family' of 'daddy mommy me' (Deleuze and Guattarri, 1971). Pre-industrial accounts of how we

develop into human persons were regulated by religion, faith and the divine, the highest human state being holiness meaning literally, wholeness (Malony, 1983). This was characterised by the human person attaining spiritual unity

with the godhead, which in Christian western societies, comprised of the tri une godhead of the father, the son and the holy spirit. In a godless universe Freud's secularised 'revelation', (and I use that term because I want us to remember that his theory came to him in a dream), shows us that instead, we are moulded by the Oedipal trinity of the 'holy family', which passes on the

policies, morality and socio-cultural milieu of the patrifocal, quasi-incestuous, neurotic culture in which it thrives.

For Freud and his followers, most of the ills of Western society can all be traced back to an inadequately internalised Oedipus in the lives of individuals,

who then go to act-out this unresolved familial complex in their wider rela

tionships with others, in the institutions and groups of the wider world. This

inadequately internalised Oedipus leads to neurosis, which it is the job of the

psychoanalyst to uncover and correct. This working through of the Oedipus complex takes place through the transferential relationship between analyst




and analysand, with the clinician occupying the position of 'locus parentis',

evoking the return of unconscious unresolved Oedipal material. The vicissi

tudes of the transference are tracked and analysed in order to resolve the

neurosis. This analytic process aims at the full acceptance and internalisation

of Oedipal Law, that is the prohibition of incest, and the redirection of this

'original' desire into a genital sexual relationship, as the cure. Only this pro cess can transform 'hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness', the explicit aim of psychoanalysis, because, for Freud, ordinary unhappiness is the norm.

Marcuse (1956, 1972), Fromm (1942, 1962), and other revolutionary and/or

socialist psychoanalytic thinkers, would not disagree that this is the most

efficient equilibrium we can expect in secular, bourgeois, capitalist society, but

then we will return to this later. In another kind of society, perhaps there

would be other possibilities. For Freud, however, those who evade Oedipus, are destined thereby to

occupy a range of marginal social positions as perhaps psychotics, mystics,

ecstatics, revolutionaries, poets and artists or a combination of these. Such

people, may not know why they are the way they are, but, say Deleuze and

Guattarri, Freud shows us that it is due to an evasion of the demands of

Oedipus, leading to a failure to love and work as others do, and accept that

ordinary unhappiness is as good as it gets. Those who are unable or unwilUng to conform to Oedipal law are the craziest and most immature of us all says

Freud.

However, within this paper, I want to suggest that the non-Oedipalised

perhaps entertain different desires to the dominant social political moraUty within which they develop and Uve. The outright pathologising of these anti

Oedipal desires risks diminishing the richly creative seams mined by those on

the margins of society. I contend, using Deleuze and Guattarri, that such

desires are compelled by a different kind of knowing, archaically embodied

(Nash, 2000), that there is something other than ordinary unhappiness, which

is worth having even if there are psychological and social costs involved. Al

though the price may be high at times, perhaps the non-Oedipalised prefer intermittent creative ecstasy even if the price is sometimes about hysterical

misery. Deleuze may be a case in point here, as a man of gifted intellect who

battled with a serious drink problem most of his life, then ended up commit

ting suicide. However, some may prefer to run such risks, than settle for the

erotic wasteland that Marcuse describes (1956), comprised of a life of con

ventional social atrophy and the soulless toil of 'ordinary unhappiness'. This

preference to evade the demands of Oedipus, is understood as the source of all

individual and social psychopathology in classical psychoanalytic thinking. This may be because the evasion of Oedipal imperatives in a society that

rewards only conformity to them, will result in a degree of marginalisation, and/or scapegoating, with the potential outcome about of hysterical misery for

the individual(s) concerned. However this description of what happens when

Oedipus is evaded does not explain why this should necessarily be so.



Jo Nash 315

I suggest, following Deleuze and Guattarri (1971,1980) that Oedipalisation is an effect of a cultural prohibition particular to a capitalist secular, bourgeois

society, and that the psychoanalytic 'cure' of accepting Oedipus only serves as

an adaption to this prohibition. What is prohibited in this cure is not incest, but ecstasy, or what Lacan would call 'jouissance' (Lacan, 1972), by which I

mean an experience of monadic 'unthought' (or rather unsymbolised) unity, of

bliss, wherein dualisms and boundaries between self and other, mind and

body, thought and feeling dissolve. Such ecstasy may be defined as pre

Oedipal in psychoanalytic in that it recalls that 'oceanic state' (Freud) psy

choanalysts believe was experienced at the mother's breast, before entry into

language. I prefer to call it trans-Oedipal, to convey the sense of having moved

beyond the demands of Oedipus, beyond triangulation, beyond the confines of

language once we have been fully interpolated into the linguistic symbolic order. Trans-Oedipal bliss, I suggest is a function of a subjectivity that has

exorcised the desires associated with Oedipus, has become deterritori?lised,

de-oedipalised, and instead becomes a nomadic assemblage of singularities that does not invest desire in an object as such, but in a life, here and now, in

pure immanence (Deleuze, 1995).

We will say of pure immanence that it is A LIFE, and nothing else. It is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. A life is the

immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete

bliss.[...] no longer dependent on a Being or submitted to an Act?it is an absolute immediate consciousness whose very activity no longer refers to a being but is

ceaselessly posed in a life [...] Small children, through all their sufferings and

weaknesses, are infused with an immanent Ufe that is pure power and even bliss. The indefinite aspects in a life lose all ind?termination to the degree that they fill out a plane of immanence or [...]to the degree that they constitute elements of a

transcendental field (Deleuze, 1995: 27-30). emphasis in original

The bliss of pure immanence is a consequence of a commitment to the

present moment, which can only be lived by embracing continuous change from a place of paradoxical stillness, the opening at the core of subjectivity comprised of a transversal desire (Buchanan, 2000) that can sustain the connective flow of what Deleuze and Guattarri termed nomadic intensities, confluences and plateaus (1972, 1983). In short, trans-Oedipal subjectivity collapses the false hierarchies and dualisms of paternal Law and relates fra

ternally, along rhizomatic lines of flight that exist on a plane of immanence, once Oedipal subjectivity has been 'tried on for size', negotiated more or less

successfully, and overcome.

The trans-Oedipal subject can evade pathology even on the social margins, as they remain aware that the Oedipal subject is in the majority, but instead 'surf the Oedipal trajectories that compel a particular mode of social organi sation, that instil a strong sense of hierarchical functioning in it's social




subjects. This hierarchical functioning reproduces a form of social production that meets the needs of the dominant class under capitalism, and so the trans

Oedipal subject threatens the continued reproduction of the capitalist system

through the enactment of revolutionary desires. As Buchanan writes the

'...reactionary mode invests desire in conformance with the interests of a domi

nant class.... revolutionary invests desire in...a transversal manner... to cut

across barriers of race, class and gender.' (Buchanan, 2000: 29)

The Oedipalised subject can attain bliss too of course, by experiencing sex

ual orgasm with one other person, albeit briefly, before that connective flow is

broken, and one is returned to the ordinary unhappiness of which Freud

writes. Or ecstasy can be attained trans-Oedipally, through a range of crea

tive, mystical and ascetic practices. These practices, including fasting, aim to

subvert the dualistic splits necessitated by a psychic economy of triangulated alienation, characteristic of Oedipalisation, industrial capitalism, and their

concomitant Cartesian and Newtonian view of the cosmos. As Deleuze writes, to remedy the alienation and false dualisms inherent in such a world view,

'The collective problem then, is to institute, find, or recover a maximum of con

nections. For connections (and disjunctions) are nothing other than the PHYSICS OF RELATIONS, THE COSMOS (Deleuze, 1993: 52)' emphasis in original.

In short, if people were able to attune to another, more ecological view of

reality, to connect with their radical (root) relationality (Brennan, 1992) with

the entire (human, organic and inorganic) environment, then the political economy and cultural ethic of competitive consumption upon which capitalism thrives (which is the only means we have of attaining a sensual form of ecstasy in secular society), would fall. I call this facility for connectedness a 'spiritual

modality' of being as pure immanence, invested with a trans-Oedipal Eros

which extends beyond the purely human matrix of objects, and partakes instead of what Deleuze calls the univocity of desire. Trans-Oedipal Eros

partakes of, yet supercedes, the purely human matrix of object relations

common to what Deleuze and Guattarri call the 'holy family', and inaugurs the

BwO as a nomadic, affective assemblage. Trans-Oedipal Eros corrupts bour

geois Oedipal limits, requisite ontological boundaries, and the compartmen taUsation of desire necessary to fuel the consumption ethic. It deterritorialises

desire from the matrix of consumption, so it instead becomes a lived reality of

relational connectivity, of continuous nomadic and rhizomatic becomings, of

territorialisations and deterritorialisations.

However, it is the cultural phenomena that defy the cultural imperatives of

Oedipus, such as those highlighted in this paper, that are probably best

explored by a social theory that also aims to actively subvert the omnipresent necrosis (causing an omnipresent neurosis?) of familial triangulation. Deleuze



Jo Nash 317

and Guattarri show us how a spiritual theory of origin and development has

been replaced by a sexual one in the form of Oedipus. I suggest that, with what

Marcuse (1956) calls the sexual 'de-repression' of secular consumer society

(with its promise of sensual ecstasy on demand continuously represented), a

retaliatory social repression of the spiritual, the sacred and the numinous are

inaugurated. This repressed spirituality nevertheless returns, in a range of

'perverse' forms, just like sex did in the underground culture of promiscuity,

adultery, disease and prostitution prevalent in the sexually repressive culture

of Victorian England. Interestingly it is this culture of sexual repression which

gave rise to psychoanalysis...to what Deleuze and Guattarri call the omni

present 'double bind' of Oedipus, just as the current age has given rise to the

secular new-age double bind, which renounces God and yet promotes the

purchase and consumption of a range of mind-body (boggling?) spiritual

therapies at one and the same time. These new age practices are what I call

mutant spiritualities (rather than perverse sexualities), though most of the

consumers of such produce have no clear conception of what their soul is, and

are not interested in whether or not God exists.

Is the double bind sustained in the life of the godless spiritual junkie an

indication of a hopeless enterprise? How can one nurture the soul or spirit in a

godless universe? Deleuze and Guattarri think that it is the inherent con

tradiction in this double bind that forestalls foreclosure, and so releases the

'desiring-production' born of creative disjuncture, which can in turn only be

understood via the non-reductive exploration they term schizoanalysis. In a

sense schizoanalysis is a total subversion of the Newtonian, dualistic ten

dencies of psychoanalysis. In the schizoanalytic schema, which is located in a

quantum universe, the cosmic fabric is not comprised of discrete objects in

space, but of a continuum of matter comprised of plateaus of intensities, of

energy, with both solid and the apparent space between objects composed of

light and dark matter. This contrasts markedly with the Newtonian, psy

choanalytic universe of ontologically boundaried objects, cathected by the

human mind as either present or absent. In the schizoanalytic quantum

universe, all is both present and absent, in continuous nomadic shifts of ter

ritorialisation and deterritorilisation, with what are termed 'lines of flight'

tracing the nomadology of this desiring production on a plane of immanence.

The subversion of the old dualist binary polarities revealed by recent cos

mology also lends itself to new ways of thinking about bodies, subjectivity and

culture. This is what Deleuze and Guattarri have taken on board in their anti

Oedipal, rhizomatic philosophy of intersubjective, 'desiring production' as the

source and destination of living, that is living as a life of pure immanence.

I suggest that the spiritually repressed, (by which I mean that aspect of our

being that is able to experience this plane of immanence) has returned in a

number of practices judged to be more or less 'perverse' by the secular and/or

orthodox religious majority looking on from the outside. In this case, regulated acts of spiritually motivated fasting, commonplace in religious societies, has




mutated into a food practice which I wish to argue remains associated with the

cultivation of ecstasy understood as 'self-transcendence, as pure immanence, that enables the physical body to become the BwO. The secularised practice of

fasting has been reconstructed as a dangerous pathology at one extreme or

eccentric health fad at the other, and includes anorexia, fad dieting, health

fasts, detoxifying cleanses and purges, and cultivated 'inedia', such as that

undertaken by the new age breatharian movement, in order that they attain a

godlike self-sufficiency. I suggest that this is because despite the widespread secularisation of culture, the age-old human desire for an experience of uni

fication, of ecstasy, and the obUteration of our existential dualities and the

sense of alienation which block this, persists and will be pursued, however

perversely (Johnson, 1987).

From religious fasting to Pro-Anorexia (Pro Ana): Inedia and the BwO

In her historical study of fasting common to religious women of the Middle

Ages, Caroline Walker-Bynum (1987) traces the lineage between the food

practices of religiously motivated fasting and contemporary anorexia.

The early 1980's saw a flurry of interest both in the popular press and among doctors in so-called female eating disorders - without the least awareness of the

reUgious context in which, until very recently, similar behaviours occurred'

(1987: 75)

She remarks on the absence of knowledge of the historical continuum in

the contemporary clinical professions involved in the treatment of anorexia, and proposes that making these links may provide new insights into the

phenomenon. The food practices of reUgious women of medieval Europe were a very serious concern of Catholic theologians at that time. The

religious significance of food for women appears in fact to be a cross-cul

tural, transhistorical phenomenon. She remarks that in the late nineteenth

and early 20th centuries there were a number of medical doctors and

CathoUc theologians who were very interested in the ability of certain

women to live without eating, stimulated in part by the case of Teresa

Neumann (d 1962) (now claimed as an inspiration to the breatharian

movement). Teams of theologians and clinicians wished to ascertain whe

ther an ability to Uve without food, or on the eucharist alone, could be a

result of supernatural powers, a medical condition, or a special grace.

Walker Bynum also remarks that Catholic theologians were deeply dis

turbed by other behaviours of these 'fasting girls', and so wished to find

that there was no such connection. These girls and women often spoke out

against the hypocrisy of the church and of holy men, in the name of the

holy spirit, and were able to discern consecrated from unconsecrated bread



Jo Nash 319

offered them during the eucharist. Unsurprisingly, the 'holy men' in charge of proceedings wished to find that these abilities were influenced by the

devil, or madness or both, rather than God. She writes;

Just as doctors and psychiatrists tend to treat fasting under such rubrics as fear of mutilation, rejection of the mother, and battle for control?forgetting that

whatever else it is, it is a food practice ?so theologians and historians have failed to notice that food miracles, eucharistie piety, and abstinence are all food prac tices. Once one notices that eating and not eating are central themes in medieval

European culture, as in many cultures, much of the long available evidence on

spirituality appears in new patterns, and new evidence begins to emerge

(1987: 75).

Recent research on the 'pro-ana' movement, (Ward, 2004) a cyber-culture of

anorexics who aim to normalise anorexia as a 'lifestyle option', rather than a

medical condition, reveals how spiritual metaphors inform their activities and are used to explain the phenomenon of 'pro-ana' anorexia. The pro-ana phi

losophy is explained as follows by the authors of web pages on one site,

Volitional, proactive anorexia is not a disease or a disorder. It is not to be con fused with EO-anorexia; it is not something invasive which one "suffers from." There are no VICTIMS here. It is a lifestyle choice that begins and ends with a

particular faculty human beings seem in drastically short supply of today: the will. (2004: http://www.plagueangel.net/grotto/idl.html)

We are also promised a forthcoming extension of the pro-ana manifesto entitled: 'Pro-Ana as Spiritual Path and Discipline: Change in Conformity

with Will' (2004: http://www.plagueangel.net/grotto/idl.html) The above quote emphasising the will certainly has a Nietzschean flavour to

it. In her paper, Ward describes how famous 'waif celebrities such as Kate Moss and Clarista Flockhart are held up as 'thinspiration' by the pro-ana movement. Also, the images of celebrities posted on the site bear comparison to the ethereal, otherworldly creatures of angels and fairies depicted in 'pro ana art'. These icons are cherished as examples of the perfection, purity and control coveted by the pro-ana movement. The icons of thinspiration demon strate their superhuman status by exercising a quasi- divine control over their

bodies, through a range of diet fads, extreme exercise, fasts, cleanses, etc. I

suggest that these people are employing secularised versions of ancient ascetic

practices involving strenuous control of fleshy desires, which similarly evoked the admiration of the followers of saints, mystics, and visionaries, and led to them being conferred with divine status for their ability to exercise extreme levels of control over 'lower' animal appetites.

When we dare to regard the food practice of fasting non-pathologically, outside the bio-medical model (Ward), then I suggest we can see a common




motivation connecting them. Each involves the human subject in the inten

tional transformation of desires, and we can trace an historical shift in the

conception of these desires and their source motivation, from the religious

concept of inspiration, or a 'divine source' of desire for change, towards a sense

that such changes are reaUy a matter of individual will, or a 'will to power', in

a Nietzchean sense, modelled by icons of thinspiration. I would like to propose that Deleuze and Guattarri's ontological plane of immanence, or 'transcen

dental unconscious' is a useful concept for explaining the volitional transfer of

these transcultural, transhistorial food practices, between religious and sec

ular societies, to re-emerge in a mutant form. The notion of the transcendental

unconscious explains why certain human desires, for example to cultivate a

sense of a body that supercedes flesh, a 'body without organs', do not die out

with secularisation, but rather 'mutate' on the plane of immanence as a result

of rhizomatic relational shifts in the intensities and flows of desire. An ancient

spiritual practice continues but becomes radically re-contextualised on the

plane of immanence, as a consequence of new relational confluences with new

technologies, generating mutant categories of something ancient but long

forgotten. In a secular context the fasting body has an 'uncanny' presence, as

something old and long familiar (Freud, 1919)) re- connects with us in new

ways to transform the expression of 'de-repressed' (Marcuse, 1956) desires.

From Pro-Ana to living on light: mutant spiritualities and the hunger

for pure immanence.

'Like a plant, surely the body can be trained to exist on nothing, to take it's nourishment from the air.

When you coast without eating for a significant period of time, and you are still

alive, you begin to scoff at those fools who believe they must eat to live. It is

blatantly obvious to you that this is not true.

Food hinders your progress.' (2004: http://www.plagueangef.net/grotto/id7.html)

The above quote was again taken form the pro-ana website, as an inspirational affirmation used to help sustain the practice. This expression of a desire to live

on air alone has also been actively cultivated as a food practice by the

breatharian movement, but not as a reclaimed eating disorder, rather as a

reordered food practice, of health benefit to adherents. This inedia is a

mutation of an ancient Eastern food practice developed by yogis, who profess to defy ageing and live on 'prana' or light', (loosely translated) rather than

sustaining the body through the ingestion of food and liquid (Jasmuheen,

1998). The belief is that human beings can indeed live on light and air just like

plants, if they transform their 'addiction' to food and eating through the



Jo Nash 321

voluntary undertaking of a twenty-one day attunement process. The self

styled guru of this movement, Jasmuheen, has an internet base for her

business, called the CIA, or the Cosmic Internet Academy. Through her site

she offers a programme of activities, a manifesto for living, that she recom

mends can help an individual achieve self-mastery. She also markets her

seminars and books through the internet too. She writes,

One of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself is complete mastery over the molecular structure and all of your energy fields. Mastery is about being empowered to exist in a state of pure health, constant regeneration, and freedom from disease on all levels of our being. (Jasmuheen, 2004: http://www.selfem powermentacademy.com.au/lifestyle2.htm)

A brief tour of the internet sites that are registered when you type 'breatharian' into any search engine demonstrate how very controversial this

food practice is. The sceptics claim that these new age gurus are conning the

public, and yet we have a long standing tradition, in human cultures of all

kinds, of a desire to live without food, or with less food temporarily. The

breatharians claim that yogis and other Eastern ascetics prove this is possible. Some also claim to be extraterrestrial beings, and weave vast systems of

thought and belief around this, that it appears to this writer, only the most

credulous would swallow (Brookes, 2005). This unearthly origin they claim

bestows them with telepathic abilities, which they also compare with the

mental state of the schizophrenic (Jasmuheen, 2004). The diagnosis of

schizophrenia is often bestowed on those with openings in their auric field that

attract parasitic energies, they claim. The cure for this condition is deliverance

through auric re-programming, say the breatharians.

Interestingly, this resonates with the Deleuzian attraction to the schizo

phrenic experience as revelatory of our real relationship to the ontological continuum, through territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritoriali

sation, between assemblages of desiring-production on the plane of imma nence. The hallucinated schizophrenic is the creator of her own world, she is

pivotal to her experience which is a product of her desires. This may be a

terrifying or an ecstatic experience, but whatever it is it is a pure production of the desires, freed from the dungeon of repression by the transcendental un

conscious. I suggest that the food practice of intentional fasting is also an act of

desiring production but a conscious act of the will, rather than an unleashed

transcendental unconscious.

Perhaps the new age market of mind-body-spirit therapies, including the

breatharians, are capitalising on the deep hunger many have in the secular

ised West for a lost sense of unity, what is often called 'transcendence', but which is about achieving a sense of expanded state of embodiment, a BwO fuelled by a transversal desire to extend experience of 'self beyond the

boundaries of skin and flesh. I contend that an exploration of the textual




content of the cyber communities referred to in this paper reveal the cultural

inscription of hunger for a lost experience of ecstasy, of bliss (Johnson, 1987) that has left a vacuum in the Western psyche, which these mutant spiritu alities hope to fill. The shared exchanges on these sites have a common nar

rative content describing how the food practice of fasting evokes a sense of

overcoming the mind-body dualities characteristic of our existential state, and

in classical psychoanalytic terms an evasion of the castration of ontological

separateness from our source of nourishment, amounts almost to an evasion of

weaning. As such the ambition to live on light' may be viewed as an anal and

narcissistic, regressive in nature and evading the existential reality of dif

ference, of otherness from a psychoanalytic Oedipal perspective. Are the

breatharians unconsciously regressing to an early nutritive state, rather akin

to the way an embryo or foetus attains nourishment in the womb at the same

time as promoting this as evidence of divine self-sufficiency? Interestingly the

breatharians are closely aligned to the rebirthing movement (Orr, 1977), with

its emphasis on regression through breathwork to attain catharsis and ener

getic cleansing. Both movements however would profess to be moving beyond the physical realm associated primarily with early life, into a post-corporeal, self sustaining, spiritual state. Both actively aim to cultivate an increased

capacity for self generated ecstasy, which signals a breakthrough into this

post-corporeal realm, followed by an inner peace resulting from a release of

archaically embodied toxins and/or stress.

Jasmuheen sells a 21 day programme through her website that, she alleges achieves a foolproof evasion of separation from this primal nutritive state, and

there is a market for it. The 21 day programme is sold by extolling the virtues

of the absence of bowel movements, the absence of a need to attend to inges tion, digestion, and elimination, which is akin to a womb like state also. The

anality of such desires for purity, sense of extreme control, and evasion of

processing matter through digestion are all too obvious to those of us with a

psychoanalytic perspective. However, once you've paid the 2000 dollars it costs

for the 21 day programme just think of all the money you'll save on food (the web site cheerfully reminds purchasers)! This practice is also sold as a cure for

world hunger, as a selfless enterprise and ultimately altruistic.

The less extreme end of this continuum from eating to no eating, includes

dieting and fasting for health reasons. Often the outcomes of fasting for health

reasons include increased energy, weight loss and sense of purification. The

desire is to transform the heaviness of the flesh, to become lighter, in a

manner akin to the fasting mystics of the main religious traditions. Those in

the pro-ana movement echo such longings for a crepuscular existence, some

where between earthly embodiment and death.

As one pro-ana writer says in a caption added to an image depicting an

angelic, fairy-like creature,



Jo Nash 323

Infinity is so damn sweet your mortal earth cannot compete...starving for the

other shore, I will not eat' (2004: http://www.plaQueanQel.netlQrotto/idl4.html)

It appears that for some, fasting is a practice expressive of secularised desire

to experience an expanded state of consciousness, that is then reconstructed as

either pathological or therapeutic, depending on the socio-cultural context and

who is involved in constructing the meaning of the practice. There is clearly a

common desire in all three practices to expand and extend the limits of the

body, whether it be through adherence to fasting supported by meditational

practice and prayer, or by the force of will power alone. This paper suggests that in an age characterised by the spread of materialistic secularisation, the chuman desire for a sense of integrated unity with what is

' beyond' the

experience of the physical plane, rather than the duality common to the

experience of mind and body as distinct, has become rationalised, recontex

tualised and expressed in other ways than explicitly 'spiritually'. I propose that superseding the body with organs, which Deleuze and Guattarri cha

racterise as a medicalised, dualistic entity, to become a 'body without organs', that is a unified energetic intensity, is driven by the fundamental desire of the

human organism for ecstasy and bUss.

Theoretical discussion and conclusion

In a secularised society, this desire and need to overcome the limits of the flesh

has become transformed into other practices that seek to satisfy this desire, in

order to become a more expanded kind of body, a body that includes a physical awareness of areas of consciousness, or exterior, collective (Jung) mind, that

used to be available to many through communal, religious and/or spiritual

practices. The only social theory that attempts to provide a language for

thinking about the states of consciousness achieved by this process of

expansion, is the work of Deleuze and Guattarri, found in Anti-Oedipus and A

Thousand Plateaus. This, perhaps to Newtonian minds, is paradoxically materialist in its ontology, but a materialism admitting of a different order of

reality, a quantum cosmology. In this schema, the body inhabits the 'mind', where the mind is conceptualised as an affective assemblage of desires tra

versing the plane of pure immanence. Body does not exist in opposition to

mind, and mind is not reducible to the brain. Mind is an energetic plateau of

consciousness, experienced via affect, as an intensity of desiring thought and

thinking. Bion's (1967) clinical observations of the affective registration of the

minutae of transference phenomena, of 'thoughts in search of a thinker'

(Bion's 'thinking' comprises of intuitive apprehensions, not mere cogitations) appear theoretically consistent with this Deleuzian enterprise. The common

foundations of both sch?mas are cosmological, as Bion too was aiming to

import quantum cosmology into psychoanalysis, and develop a concomitant




theory of embodied mind, experienced affectively, then processed cognitively through the symbolism of linguistic naming and containing. When language fails us said Bion, psychosis may set in. The purpose of psychoanalytic dis course is to provide a language for the subtle registrations of affective expe rience that would otherwise remain unsymbolised and uncontained. Having a

language as a container for affective experiences may help prevent disinte

gration, psychosis and regression, because symbolisation through language enables conscious thinking to take place. I propose that Deleuze and Guattarri

provide us with a language for conceptualising how the psychological pro cesses Bion attends to, called the 'unthought known' by Bollas (1987), operate in the wider social and cultural sphere, in terms of a 'political physics' of social

relations (Protevi, 2001). Deleuze and Guattarri use Newtonian psychoanalysis against itself, to

subvert the ontological dualities and hierarchical medical model underpinning the polarised classification of existential states into pathological or healthy.

Hence their subversion of a psychoanalysis based as it is upon an unconscious

deploying repression as the guiding principle of civilisation, becomes instead

schizoanalysis that deploys the unconscious as a 'factory', generating desiring

production. Hence the famous quote from Anti-Oedipus 'A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the

analyst's couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world.'

(Deleuze & Guattari, 1971: 2) Classical psychoanalysis with its unconscious as the inaugurator of

repression tends always to a reductionist pathologising of any and all differ ence from what is regarded as, 'Oedipally', that is socially 'normal' within the

social formation of Western capitalism. For psychoanalysts the evasion of

Oedipalisation, and the concomitant evasion of its actualisation in the 'holy

family', indicates developmental failure and emotional arrest. Yet many of the most creative people in Western societies do just that. Family life may not be

conducive to creative production of anything other than children, unless there is a bifurcation of roles, that enables one or other partner to evade most

childcare, or parents are able to pay staff to perform this function. It is difficult to imagine how a woman breastfeeding her infant might write a book, create a

sculpture or compose music.

Schizoanalytic language enables us to conceptualise various processes

engaged in what is 'other' to familial desiring production, in non-pathologis

ing, and cosmologically materialist terms. This language draws upon a sub

verted psychoanalytic quantum cosmology of interrelationality, that admits of no 'essence' or impenetrable boundary between what appear to us as discrete

objects. Rather we live in a universe of energetic assemblages, of rhizomati

cally organised, nomadically transitional desires. All exists on an energetic continuum of affects comprising confluences and flows of intensities of desire, interconnected through the plane of immanence, which is an omnipresent

trajectory that participates in and transforms what is', from inorganic brute



Jo Nash 325

matter to the most highly complex organism. In this way, a human being and a

stone are very much related, and their existence connected through the

machinic couplings of their particular assemblages, through the flows and

intensities that converge in plateaus on the plane of immanence. Freud called

these flows 'cathexes', that is the investment of unconscious desire in our

environment that enables us to construct meaning, and prioritise our relations

to objects in terms of their ontological significance. Much of the conceptual schema adopted by Deleuze and Guattarri is psychoanalytic in origin, but

involves a profound subversion of the discursive dualities of reductive

pathology employed by psychoanalysts. It delivers us from the categorisations of the psychoanalytic mind that enable it to exercise an illusory rationalising

omnipotence, a sense of being in control of what is irrational through the

activity of naming. Deleuze and Guattarri also developed a discourse for

naming the irrational, but decline any need for control through symbolisation.

They celebrate the irrationality and radical uncertainty of the universe as the source of creativity as desiring production, whether it be expressed in science,

poetry, music or love.

It is my contention that the Deleuzian model of social relations grounded in a materialist political physics (Protevi) of affect and desire can contribute to an

understanding of how the practice of rigorous fasting, enables one to achieve an altered state of consciousness that permits an experience of this plane of

immanence. The food practice of inedia; whether aligned to religion, pro anorexia 'thinspiration', or breatharians living on light', enables practitioners to achieve an altered state of consciousness that permits a collapsing of the dualistic affective divisions between subject and object, within and beyond, to

enable an experience of transversal, trans-Oedipal desire to enjoy both, at one

and the same time. This experience overcomes the alienation characterising the everyday existence of human beings subject to the psycho-social and

political dictates of modern industrial society. It is an experience of the col

lapsing of the inner and outer world's, common to those suffering from psy

chosis, but also to the mystical imagination that underpins much creative

work, as Deleuze and Guattarri propose. Fasting can enable this process, can

be ecstatic practitioners claim. In schizoanalytic terms it can reconnect us to that Oedipally prohibited bliss we crave, enable us to move beyond the cor

poreal 'self, to 'transcend' the body with organs to become a BwO on the plane of immanence.

Fasting to attain a conscious connective flow within the plane of immanence

then, is in some ways, a subversive activity. It enables practitioners to attain an existential state of consciousness beyond the conventional dualist divisions

manipulated and driven by the objectifying forces of consumerist capitalism. Binary divisions of inner and outer, self and other, mind and body, thought and feeling, are overcome, through a conscious decision to resist the desire to consume. This enables practitioners to resist being invaded and colonised by a

dominant cultural ethic of consumption, and subjected to these dualistic forces




of fragmentation, of disintegration. In this way voluntary inedias, whether

regarded as pathological or healthy, may be a modal expression of the 'body without organs'. The BwO resists the consumerist cultural imperative to

ingest from the outside, then project out from the inside, in order to construct

meaning, to define itself, with no substantive desire of its own to intervene.

The BwO challenges a culture that reproduces repression of a desire for

ecstasy, undermines creativity, and stifles imagination. However to all this there is a paradox: these secular fasting practices resist

the colonisation by the consumption ethic, but at the same time 'buy into' a set

of desirable images re: the body beautiful, the healthy body. Perhaps the thin

body is celebrated because it is an image of power and control, of an inspired will to power, in a culture saturated with stimuli to overeat. Perhaps that is

why wilfully thin people attain a god-like status, in a secular, consumerist

society. They are an embodied reality of the self-sufficient, narcissistic indi

vidualism characteristically desired as the highest good by Western societies.

This is achieved not by consuming food, but by consuming diets, health

cleanses, purges, alternative therapies, exercise programmes, and the cultural

produce of 'thinspired' fitness gurus. Much of these food practices are con

nected to new age mind-body-spirit practices that endow them with a mutated

spiritual meaning. New agers transform their desires by shopping for prac tices that enable them to cultivate other ones. While a preoccupation with

limiting food intake means some consumption patterns are transformed, the

purchase of fasting regimes, diets, purges, new age books, seminars and

micronutrients means the consumption ethic of western societies remains

intact. It is difficult to see what is in any way 'spiritual', or even 'alternative'

about that.

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