Body politic

Diogenes the Cynic (c.412-323 BC) provides not only the title but the guiding spirit for this book about people who use their bodies as sites of resistance or protest. The Greek philosopher also known as “Diogenes the Dog” slept, masturbated and defecated in the public square as a way to protest against political corruption. “Other dogs bite their enemies”, he said. “I bite my friends to save them.” It follows, Fernanda Eberstadt argues, that hurting one’s own body can be healthy for the body politic.

Brought up on Park Avenue in New York, the author comes from money: one grandfather was an investment banker and policy adviser; the other was the poet Ogden Nash. Her mother was a society beauty, but also sickly and needy. By the age of fourteen Eberstadt was trying to escape not only her mother’s clutches but also her own body, which she saw as betrayed by puberty. “I can still feel the mad grief of my tomboy body slipping away from me, the shock of morphing into this more cumbersome sluggish mammal, the feeling that your own flesh had become an enemy; that your outside could no longer be made to express your true self.” Slinking off to explore New York’s creative underground, she met Stephen Varble, a flamboyant anticapitalist and “gutter artist” who liked to flounce around the city in ballgowns made from rubbish. In 1976 Varble stormed a bank wearing a gown made of dollar bills and breasts formed by twin condoms filled with cow’s blood. Then he exploded the breasts and used the blood to write cheques for “none million dollars”, so proving himself a worthy successor to Diogenes, who was banished from Sinope for debasement of currency.

Eberstadt draws lines from the Greek philosopher to other refuseniks for whom protest has been a whole-body experience. In the third centurythe Christian martyr Saint Perpetua kept a prison diary describing in detail her physical pain, especially the discomfort of not being able to breastfeed her baby. Abel Barbin was born intersex in France in 1838, raised female and then, on discovery of her homosexuality, legally forced to live as a man. Her life and memoir inspired writing by the philosophers Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, as well as Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex; she died by suicide in 1868. Foucault himself is included, with a focus on his expériences limites, which saw the French philosopher pushing at the boundaries of experience through sadomasochistic sex and drug use.

Eberstadt meets Nadya Tolokonnikova, from the Russian protest group Pussy Riot, whose own, often naked, bodies have been at the heart of anti-Putin protests. She becomes friendly with Piotr Pavlensky, who in 2013 nailed his scrotum to the stones of Red Square in protest at Russians’ political apathy, and his wife, Oksana. “I found myself thinking about all the individuals throughout history whose seemingly masochistic, paradoxical or death-seeking acts have encouraged others to stand up to power”, Eberstadt writes.

The category is necessarily subjective (Jesus doesn’t get a look-in) and sometimes seems in danger of stretching too wide, to include everyone who experienced the trauma of the Second World War, for instance, or the pain of childbirth (which Pavlensky agrees is much worse than putting a nail through your scrotum – that’s “just soft tissue”).

Yet part of what makes Bite Your Friends so engaging, as well as fascinating, is the author’s uncertainty about her parameters. “Don’t trust me, I’m a fake, sure, my expensive education’s given me this gloss of authority, but actually I’m so clueless I don’t even know what I don’t know”, she writes in one of many privilege-checking self-disparagements. It’s arguable whether Foucault’s sadomasochistic experiments had any benefit for wider society, while Pier Paolo Pasolini’s views were often “frankly reactionary”. The Italian film-maker, who stood trial thirty-three times for obscenity, among other charges, opposed contraception. He claimed, somewhat bafflingly, that consumerist power had manipulated and violated “the bodies and sex organs of the new generation of Italian youth and boys”. However his yearning to return to a time of (pre-contraception) carnal innocence was self-serving, writes Eberstadt, since “if heterosexual boys can safely sleep with their girlfriends, they won’t be so willing to duck into the bushes with him”.

She’s also refreshingly willing to have been wrong about at least one of her heroes. Pavlensky, whose trial for arson in Paris she attended in 2019, later turned out to have been violently abusive to his wife over many years. In her memoir Oksana included Eberstadt in a list of people who had observed their “masquerade as a perfect couple” and “evidently noticed nothing”. The author is characteristically contrite:

There’s a tradition among writers of overlooking violence because they want to believe a myth, whether it’s the myth of a utopian state or the myth of an ascetic selflessly devoted to a noble cause. I’d joined that guild of “useful idiots,” because I wanted to believe that Pavlensky was someone who, in Foucault’s words, had made his life and art “the irruptive, violent, scandalous manifestation of the truth.” In fact, what I learned was that Pavlensky was indeed an artist of violence and scandal, but that his willingness to go head-to-head with state power came from his conviction that power was the only thing that mattered, even if it was just his own power over a woman’s mind and body.

The narrative returns often to the author’s mother, her illnesses and the damage caused her by experimental drugs, but Mrs Eberstadt isn’t an easy fit. There’s no sense of that pain being channelled into protest, unless we decide that all pain is a form of protest. More interesting is the author’s longing – and nostalgia – for the intensity of feeling she experienced in her youth. Many people can relate to that sentiment, if not to the alarming degree of intensity described here. There was a time, she writes, when “if you’d suggested I join you in the making of a snuff movie I would probably have said yes – and in fact this attraction has never really left me, it just takes other forms”.

That hunger for the limit-experiences described by Foucault would have landed her in prison if she hadn’t been “a rich, white girl”. In fact, in reaction against these youthful excesses, for a time she became a “born again zealot”, a neoconservative, pro-Zionist and anticommunist.

Now in her sixties and living in rural France, her children grown up and husband happily creating a vegetable garden, Eberstadt would seem to have found a safe harbour. Yet clearly she feels an itch for the physical danger that defined her teenage years and her friendship with Varble. She describes googling the artist and the “stomach drop” of finding nothing, followed by the sadness of learning that he had died of Aids-related complications in 1984. “The sense of desolation was pretty much unbearable.”

The concept of a body as merely a shell, able to withstand pain in the cause of protecting the ideas contained within, is as old as religion. But it is by paying attention to the body, Eberstadt writes, that “we remain protected from moral demagogy and from the terror of radical abstractions that cannot be lived out …”. As more of us spend the day in front of a screen, it’s getting harder to feel “embodied”.

The answer is to “flee into reality”, she writes, quoting Peter Sloterdijk, and by the end of the book we’re not sure what that means for Fernanda Eberstadt. Will she stay safely in France or find another way to push at the limits?

Miranda France is a consultant editor at the TLS

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