The Asceticism of the Oppressed: Anticolonial Ethics and the Politics of Collective Self-Transformation

Abstract

Asceticism has a bad reputation in political and social theory—insofar as it has any reputation at all. If it is not ignored entirely, it tends to be aligned with either political elitism or political quietism. On the one hand, asceticism is often considered a special privilege of the aristocracy, which alone has the leisure to turn away from worldly affairs and cultivate the self as an aesthetic object, and thus to reproduce its dominant position in a social hierarchy that it has a strong interest in maintaining. On the other hand, theorists from Hegel to Arendt and beyond have dismissed asceticism and practices of self-transformation as a mere retreat from politics into the “inner citadel.” This article seeks to excavate and theorize a counter-tradition of political asceticism in order to demonstrate that practices of the self are not the property of the elite and indeed have been the conditions of possibility for anticolonial and anti-racist resistance struggles in highly diverse contexts. With comparative attention paid especially to M.K. Gandhi and Frederick Douglass, we argue that traditional dismissals of asceticism in political theory have missed (a) the extent to which the “inner citadel” is often the prime location for struggle left to the colonized; (b) how this inner citadel is weaponized in endeavors to train oneself into capacities of political agency; and (c) how this training-into-agency—which we call liberation asceticism—is not merely an individual but a truly collective practice.

Introduction: From Practice of the Self to Asceticism of the Oppressed

This article proposes a “decolonial turn” in the Western philosophical tradition by demonstrating (1) that asceticism is not the sole preserve of the privileged and has been mobilized by other social groups to reverse the balance of power and (2) that the political/individual antinomy that has been used to delegitimize asceticism simply does not apply to subaltern groups such as slaves and the colonized—paving the way for a new reflection on the revolutionary potential of ascesis.

Western political theory has long been suspicious of “the self” as a relevant locus for politics. Perhaps the self is forged by and within political regimes and structures of domination, but its attempts to break free from the powers that englobe it remain a private affair in contradistinction to the public and collective action of the demos, the true subject of political history. ¹ Hannah Arendt, for instance, was skeptical about the political pertinence of ascetic self-transformation, given that it entails a kind of withdrawal from the public world “into the security of an inward realm in which the self is exposed to nothing but itself.” ² Isaiah Berlin, ³ following in the path of Hegel, ⁴ has similarly dismissed asceticism as the process by which one obtains (false) freedom: not by removing obstacles to action but by convincing oneself that these latter are not, in fact, obstacles. Asceticism is a mere “strategic retreat to an inner citadel,” the “traditional self-emancipation of quietists, [. . .] men who liberate themselves from the yoke of society [. . .] and remain isolated and independent on its edges.” ⁵ Critics on the left continue to warn that self-transformation is a kind of personal consolation for political powerlessness ⁶ and a distraction from genuine and collective politics. ⁷

If ascesis develops freedom only at the expense of depoliticization, of what use is it for political theorists and actors interested in transforming really existing structures of domination? Was Gandhi a dupe of his own spirituality when he once argued that “prolonged training of the individual soul is an absolute necessity” for political resistance? ⁸ And Fanon a fool when he asserted that “it is through the effort to recapture the self [. . .] that men will be able to recreate the ideal conditions of existence for a human world”? ⁹ The traditional conception of the “inner citadel” falters significantly when we try to understand the political action of the colonized and the oppressed more generally. Descriptively, even definitionally, we must indeed grant that the colonized are refused entry into the public sphere. ¹⁰ But this means precisely that any “turn inwards” must be understood against the context of this constitutive exclusion: no “retreat” has been undertaken. In a situation of “social death,” where the slave is “violently uprooted from his milieu” ¹¹ and loses every political right, the inner citadel can even remain the only way to do politics.

The question, then, is not whether but how slaves and the colonized have constituted a politics from outside of politics: using the inner citadel as an Archimedean point for something that could be referred to as mere ethics only with a great deal of simplification. Asceticism can generate the forces and skills needed to overthrow the oppressor, and it can solidify and empower a communal response precisely to the condition of being denied access to the public space. The inner citadel is not the antipode of the political; it is a small seam in an otherwise seamless subjection. Selves-in-training tear open the distinction between the public and the private; the oppressed equip themselves to take the colonial public space by storm.

In this article, we follow Foucault and our own earlier articulations, which restore ascesis to its precise meaning of “training”: not merely self-denial, but cultivated rigor in the name of improving one’s capacities for certain modes of action. ¹² Indeed, asceticism is a concept that overcomes the apparent dichotomy between renunciation and maximization: Training is about refusing to put our energies into some activities while suffering in order to increase our capacities in others; renunciation usually just describes the fact that ascetics practice to attain abilities that require abstention from other practices typically considered desirable. ¹³ Asceticism, thus understood, is about a qualification of the subject as a carrier of capacities and habits, and the term thus refers to an organized set of auto-poetic and capacity-qualifying gestures (askeseis)—a system of gradated and interlocking exercises of reading, writing, postural practice, breath control, fasting, walking, meditation, rhetorical expression, etc.

Because asceticism is usually reduced to a kind of low-grade but constant self-harm (as in Nietzsche), it can be helpful to specify the concept in relation to that of disembodiment (Entleibung). For Bargu, ¹⁴ disembodiment collects a wide range of “kindred and adjacent” auto-destructive actions on a continuum of which suicide stands only as the extreme and final term, united as instances of “expressive agency.” While Kant might collect behaviors such as fasting, maiming, and suicide under the rubric of Entleibung insofar as they each (apparently) violate the imperfect duty of self-perfection (viz., developing one’s natural capacities for action), Bargu’s concept is not normative but descriptive: in myriad distinct but comparable situations, disembodiment has served simultaneously as an embodied critique of bodily suffering and a claim upon other, different, dignified human futures now “pitilessly blocked” by domination.

The asceticism of the oppressed notably shares with practices of disembodiment that it is a means of inflecting relations of domination directly in and through the body, responding to a power that is already acting on the body and doing so when other, more traditional political avenues have been closed. But asceticism is neither the equivalent nor the opposite of self-destruction; their continua meet at a perpendicular. Asceticism can include practices that appear as auto-destructive (notably fasting)—or rather, we can name such practices as ascetic insofar as they are at the same time self-destructions and self-enablings, that is, as qualifications of one’s capacities for action, as modifications of the economy of energy. As such, asceticism collects certain instances of Entleibung and articulates them with—and precisely because they are also—forms of Leibliche Maximierung. Thus, we might say that (in most cases) maiming and (in all cases) suicide are not ascetic—not because these are self-harming, but rather and only insofar as they are autofinal expressive gestures. ¹⁵ To speak grammatically, if Entleibung is agency as deixis, askesis is agency as the passage to the infinitive.

The asceticism of the oppressed is a broad social fact. One could see the activism of figures like Angela Davis, bell hooks, or Audre Lorde—who marshalled techniques like visualization and self-hypnosis to overcome pain and feelings of impotence, to undertake intellectual work, or to actively direct attention to ongoing political struggles—as forms of revolutionary training defying traditional forms of political engagement. Industrial workers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created for themselves a mutually supportive discipline within and against the general discipline of the factory—for example, by dividing tasks such that three workers could increase their own cadence and liberate a fourth to read to them aloud, or by finding a bodily posture permitting Latin study while weaving, with the goal of gaining skills that the factory owners themselves possessed. ¹⁶ While we have the ambition of providing tools helpful to understanding the resistance dynamics that have marked queer, feminist, and worker politics, our case study will be that of the colonized (although the colonized can obviously occupy several of these categories and vice versa), and more specifically two cases that we take to be emblematic: slavery (abolition) in the United States and (de)colonization in India.

Western countries conceived slavery as the most efficient way to extract resources from conquered territories (and eventually to embark on new “civilizing missions”), leading many scholars to treat slavery and colonization as part of the same conceptual framework. ¹⁷ From a theoretical standpoint, a comparative analysis in this vein allows us to highlight similarities between slavery’s and colonialism’s techniques of government, even across different periods and continents, without reducing them to an identity. It also reveals how the ascetic counter-conducts that emerged from and against them used comparable tools. Rather than address “colonialism” and “slavery” as such, we are interested in one specific technique of government that they share: the ability of one class to define the daily autopoietic gestures (the training regime) of another, so as to qualify the (in)capabilities of subject bodies in ways conducive to the projects of the dominant. In this connection, what is striking is that resistance to this technique of governance is formally similar in the two cases, generally passing through: (a) the creation of alternative spaces of training that (b) enable the production of a collective political subject (c) working upon itself as a set of bodies and as a group (d) to gain political capacities that aid in refusing the very structure of domination in which they are caught. Simply put, a comparative approach appeared to be the best way to establish the substantive marrow of liberation asceticism and to elaborate a concept whose living manifestations can be seen wherever the scenes of “racial capitalism” emerge upon the world stage.

In establishing these arguments, we proceed as follows. Part 1 discusses aristocratic asceticism, a form of training jealously guarded by the elite classes as a means of retaining privilege. Part 2 then sketches the shadow of this aristocratic asceticism, namely the imposition by the elite upon an underclass of a training regime by which bodies are depoliticized. Part 3 then argues that in spite of this seemingly damning pedigree, asceticism as such does not belong to the dominant but has long enabled liberatory programs that generate power for the powerless. After having delineated aristocratic asceticism, negative asceticism, and collective/liberation asceticism, we conclude with reflections on both the limitations and the contemporary relevance of this study. ¹⁸ Throughout, we rebut the traditional dichotomies of individual-collective, self-other, private-public—not so much by struggling against them as flawed conceptions as by showing how they have been challenged by really existing and marginalized political actors. We thus take important cues from Raymond Geuss, who recently argued that one very effective way of refusing a hegemonic but false dichotomy is to “paint a picture of a form of life” that challenges it, one “which is not just possible, but which actually existed, where this is to be contrasted with the construction of arguments in favor of a position or the refutation of objections.” ¹⁹ This does not mean that philosophical argument should be considered obsolete for politics; it does mean that “anthropology” can be deeply political. What follows leverages political histories for a critical theory of asceticism. It attempts not to dictate the forms that political activity must take to be legitimate, but seeks to salvage asceticism from a certain canonical oblivion.

Part 1. The “Aristocracy of Talent”: Asceticism, Elitism, and Individual Exceptionalism

Asceticism has a reputation as an aristocratic and individualist practice, and not without reason. From Alcibiades to Dionysius of Syracuse, from Michel de Montaigne to the meritocratic elite of the twenty-first century, rhetorical training, spiritual exercises, and, most recently, “wellness” activities have been the prerogative of the leisured and privileged classes and often precisely a means for the maintenance of social privilege. Here we offer an admittedly lacunary genealogy of this political dynamic.

Due to Pierre Hadot’s works, scholars are well aware that ancient philosophy was an asceticism but Greek political culture was also deeply ascetic beyond the limited sphere of the philosophical school. Athenian democracy is highly instructive because it was, in principle, meant to ensure complete equality among citizens in their right to speak, all while relying on a mass of noncitizens whose labor made possible the leisure time requisite for gaining the skills needed in the constant battle for hegemony within this elite circle. The Sophistic movement of the fifth century is best understood as a creative intervention into this particular arena of direct “democracy,” a codification of an art for the conversion of leisure time into embodied political capability. Paul Rabbow summarized this Erziehungskunst in precisely these terms:

an intensifying of the political and social relations in the democratic city-states by those who wanted to [. . .] gain ascendance in the battle for political power required an intensification of knowledge, capabilities, and modes of being, [which] pushed necessarily towards a new and more intense form of training than the old, traditional education and training of the polis. ²⁰

The formal political equality of classical Athens was little more than the soil from which the real battle for political ascendancy grew, via a rigorous training in the political art of rhetoric, the power-symbolic art of self-mastery and appetite limitation, the virile ethic of sexual nonpassivity, and the military art of courage. ²¹

Max Weber and Michel Foucault have also noted the link between asceticism and hegemony in complementary ways. While Weber offers a bleak vision of asceticism as humanity’s self-enclosure in an “iron cage,” in contrast to the more optimistic tone that characterizes Foucault’s late treatment of “practices of the self,” both agree that training, and more specifically the ethic of training, was important in the political rise of the bourgeoisie. For Foucault, this happened above all in the generation of a cultivated sexual ethic that served to reproduce the distinction of the aristocratic class; it “underscored the high political price of its body, sensations and pleasures, its well-being and survival,” ²² as well as its “race.” ²³ For Weber, the bourgeoisie’s early commitment to hard effort was one of the main features in its political fight against monarchy, legitimizing their commodification of land and the progressive access to parliamentary spheres; rigorous labor was rapidly perceived as a rational method to obtain money—conceived as a virtue—and as evidence for salvation. ²⁴ In these genealogies, the technique of asceticism slowly moved from Greco-Roman aristocratic circles to European monasteries, before “the Reformation took rational Christian asceticism and its methodological habits out of the monasteries and placed them in the service of the active world.” ²⁵ The modern history of asceticism is the history of its successive appropriation by different social groups in their bid to establish themselves as the new spiritual, political, or economic hegemon.

In the twenty-first century, the protestant ethic has become imbricated with the project of meritocratic self-edification. ²⁶ Critics and proponents of meritocracy converge on the basic idea that in the neoliberal market economy, it is those most rigorously trained in certain highly valued capacities who come to dominate economically and politically. Wooldridge has precisely used the term aristocracy of talent to make clear that today those who exercise a hard-won talent have taken the position once reserved for a hereditary elite. ²⁷ While critical voices argue that access to the training programs required to produce such skills (those exercised in liberal and financial professions) is, in fact, still determined by family wealth (Sandel 2020; Markovits 2019), they agree that one of the distinctive features of the neoliberal meritocracy is that economic privilege cannot be acquired, strictly speaking. ²⁸ The new “working rich” find themselves constantly improving their own skills—notably through professional degrees, rigorous measurement and organizing of daily tasks, wellness activities, and special tutoring—in order to symbolically and materially reiterate their deservingness for a position that, in the contrary case, the next disciplined pseudo-aristocrat will happily take from them.

Any attempt to redeploy asceticism as a liberatory concept must come to terms with the fact that, in many of its instantiations, it has existed within a seemingly unbreakable cycle of privilege. In the first instance, because asceticism requires a certain leisure from the pressing concerns of directly (re)productive labor, those already in a position of social dominance are most able to practice it. Secondly and conversely, this leisure time can, via asceticism, be converted into new or maximized performance capacities that serve to reinforce the position of privilege (which is at the same time the condition of possibility for further asceticism). Even where strict training regimes have enabled social ascendancy, this has tended to be in cases of individuals who, through their “grit,” are able to climb the social ladder without interrupting the structures of domination that are the condition of possibility of this climbing.

Our double challenge is thus to show, first, that even those excluded from mainstream paradigms of privilege-reproduction have found ways ascetically to cultivate political agency; second, that this cultivation, in spite of some structural similarities, was not yet another version of “climbing” but a collective struggle with structurally transformative ambitions.

Part 2. Negative Asceticism: Training into Subservience

Europe is straining every nerve to make over yellow, brown, and black men

into docile beasts of burden.

—W. E. B. Du Bois ²⁹

But to fully appreciate the ingenuity of liberation asceticism, we must first deepen the paradox by highlighting and clarifying a technique of governance implied in the above-sketched cycle of privilege: namely, what we call negative asceticism, whose presence across apparatuses as distinct as enslavement, disciplinary labor, and colonization is striking. A shadow of aristocratic asceticism, negative asceticism is not undertaken by the dominant class but imposed by them upon a dominated one. This fundamental technology of self-reproduction becomes functional once one class can impose a regime of autopoietic gestures upon another, in the interest of qualifying subjects who will contribute to the well-being of the dominant class while being rendered incapable of refusing their domination.

In classical Athens, slaves were not only excluded from politically enabling training; they were not only forced to make this training economically possible for their masters. They were, in their very slavery, submitted to another training regime pushing them into a decapacitated, antipolitical subjectivity that reiterated their status and standing in this vicious circle. Behind every Laches or Alcibiades existed a plethora of slaves whose daily routines—and not their “nature”—turned them into the human tools that Aristotle simultaneously loathes and requires. Coercive and belittling training structures resulted symbolically and materially in political “weakness” and a visible habitus destined to prove its own inferiority in an oikophobic culture; the psychosomatic gains for the cultivated Athenian ruling class corresponded to a psychosomatic loss for the noncitizens. “Talent” here is vampiric vitalism, a reified return of the self-mutilation of the oppressed.

We can trace versions of this technique of government into modern slavery. Elsa Dorlin has shown that political tractability was generated not only from the legal destruction of personhood but from the habitual, even “muscular” destruction of capacities for revolt. This entailed the enforced absence of any training programs that could “provide the occasion for slaves to prepare themselves, to train themselves (s’exercer) for revolt”—such as traditional dances or martial arts—as well as the enforced presence of training routines that rendered bodies docile. ³⁰ Orlando Patterson has detailed these dynamics in the context of the antebellum United States, where a master’s “honor”—here equivalent to his social power—required the absolute dishonor of the slave. ³¹ Alongside loss of the name and absence of family rights, the embodiment of a permanent fear of being killed served as an imposed training program. Public wealth and the reputation of White people required a daily terror in the private sphere. Practiced in the “liminal space” between life and death, negative asceticism took the form of a training into nonbeing, fear, depletion—the polar opposite of American puritanism’s will to self-fulfillment.

The consequences of negative asceticism here are reified racial, sexual, and class identities. In a radical take on “negritude,” Hartman writes that:

Pain must be recognized in its historicity and as the articulation of the social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need, and constant violence: [. . .] it is the perpetual condition of ravishment. [. . .] This pain might best be described as the history that hurts, the still unfolding narrative of captivity, dispossession and domination that engenders the black subject in the Americas. ³²

As Wilderson has also argued, abolition is a direct continuation of slavery. ³³ Schools and education manuals “shared lessons on labor, conduct, consumption, hygiene [or] marriage,” ensuring, with the enduring practice of lynching, the transformation of the “formerly enslaved as rational individuals and dutiful subordinates.” ³⁴ The protestant ethic was in such contexts a forced conformity, a disciplinary weapon directed against the “dangerous classes,” for whom “self-mastery was invariably defined as willing submission to the dictates of former masters, the market and the inquisitor within.” ³⁵ Black Codes shaped an intimate micropolitics in which repression of vagrancy and theft were the driving forces. In the “afterlife of slavery,” ³⁶ discipline and sovereign power reinforced each other, culminating in a more efficient integration of the Black workforce into capitalist circuits; “the carceral [was] the caricature of the plantation and [presumed] continuities between the management of slave and free labor.” ³⁷

Freire, drawing on Hegel, once argued that the notion of “being human” has often been employed as a kind of euphemism for being elite, which has always meant, in turn, being lord over other humans. ³⁸ Negative asceticism is a concept that can concretize this logic. It is not merely a different name for the classic master/slave dialectic, but a precise piece of the material process of subjection and subjectivation: around and inside it are formed and disbursed antagonistic social identities. Negative asceticism points to the material-bodily process by which a subjugated subject-position is developed and the complex set of abilities and ability gaps into which it is trained. We are what we repeatedly do, as the pseudo-Aristotelian slogan says. And not everyone can define for themselves the repeated doings that define them. The master-slave dialectic is an artificial logic generated within the segregational systems of slavery and colonialism, subsequently reified as an ideational process in Western philosophy; ³⁹ its overcoming is neither natural nor teleological but requires interruptions in the concrete, daily asceticism of the oppressed.

Part 3. Training for Liberation: Ascetic Heterotopias and Anticolonial Ethics

Negative asceticism assures the absence of precisely the capacities whose presence would be essential for resistance to the domination of those whose dominance allows them to impose this training regime. This is a tight circle. Can ascesis really be redeployed by the dominated? Perhaps the best argument in the affirmative comes from the simple fact that the oppressed have done just this. Indeed, to ask how one could possibly repurpose this conservative tradition is to concede too much; we would rather deny ownership of the ascetic tradition to the aristocratic classes. It is erroneous to draw an automatic link between the two: a conversion of a pattern of social relations—elites tend to be able to practice asceticism more easily—into a conceptual tie. But a conscious and successful rehabilitation of one’s ascetic practices is part of the class struggle staged in the bodily diet.

The Refuge, or Asceticism and the Art of Reading

Just as the individual exceptionalists of the meritocratic market have their spaces of productive coercion (the university; the yoga studio; the gym; the private tutoring and exam preparation centers), liberation asceticism needs to find, take back, or create a training space of its own, where the oppressed can collectively and individually (re)write the script of their daily exercises and hence of their embodied agency. Re-creating a self relies on sanctuaries allowing one to recover from the complex web of patriarchal, racist, and capitalist relations at the very core of colonialism. In this sense, liberation asceticism operates a clear strategic reversal in its reappropriation of the idea and practice of the heterotopia, the other-space set off from the primary social space of the socio-politically privileged. In other words, while “the camp” certainly served as a strategic cornerstone in myriad programs of segregation and domination—it is perhaps the colonial space par excellence ⁴⁰ —one should not forget the subversive history of what we will call ascetic heterotopias.

Ascetic heterotopias have been generated under the most hostile of conditions and have taken a multitude of forms. One important modality is the refuge, clearly discernible in the literature on/from American slavery. Frederick Douglass “held [his] First Sabbath school at the house of a free colored man,” ⁴¹ in a safe space where he was able to teach his fellow slaves how to write and learn. In this model, where extradited slaves do not even have a physical land to reconquer, the creation of a refuge is a pure necessity. The refuge becomes a rhizomatic and nomadic territory proliferating in the interstices of power. Enabling slaves to escape from “mental darkness” and to feed the “minds [that] have been starved by their cruel masters,” ⁴² Douglass’s school—not unlike Tubman’s Underground Railroad—is a concrete heterotopia of freedom serving as a rift in the total domination of slavery, a preparation space where threatened communities can generate physical-spiritual resistance forces against the racial state that has arranged for their atrophy.

The founding of this heterotopia was methodological, guided by the “new and special revelation” that Douglass had experienced in Baltimore, where his first clandestine reading lessons made him clearly see “the pathway from slavery to freedom.” ⁴³ It was also there, through repeatedly reading the Columbian Orator with an ever-increasing interest, ⁴⁴ that he first seemingly turned the “master’s tools” toward liberty. After all, the schoolbook consisted of rhetorical progymnasmata exercises in connection to figures such as Socrates and Cato. This initial act of “poaching” fueled a nascent literacy and allowed Douglass to grasp the injustice of his situation, hone his resentment against slavery, and motivate his subsequent commitment to abolitionism (especially in light of Sheridan’s powerful “denunciation of oppression” and “vindication of the rights of man”). ⁴⁵

Sabbath school institutionalized the emancipatory potential that Douglass had gleaned from hegemonic culture, instantiating a communal mode of training-unto-freedom in which rigorous practice in the art of reading (and especially reading and discussing the Bible) was the central node. In addition to equipping slaves with knowledge and a growing confidence, this training also effected an interruption in the usual circuits of energy expenditure—displacing, for example, bodily practices such as “wrestling, boxing and drinking whisky” in which the masters would rather have seen slaves dispense the remainder of their vital élan “than to see [them] behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings.” ⁴⁶ Before it was dismantled, its first iteration in St. Michael’s comprised a “dozen spelling books” and a “few testaments” as well as “twenty scholars” who learned to read “the gospel of the son of god.” ⁴⁷ Douglass offered exercises that could reproduce his own earlier training, to “make a little Baltimore here [in St. Michael’s].” ⁴⁸ Its second iteration took place “under the trees” at Mr. Freeland’s farm, though the training structure remained essentially the same: gathering “twenty or thirty young men” who would pilfer spelling books from “their young masters and mistresses.” ⁴⁹

Douglass’s exercises take the form of a ritual involving the distinct acts of (1) stealing a material embodying hegemonic knowledge, despite the dangers associated with the operation; (2) gathering in a secret space with a group of like-minded fellows “imbued with the desire to learn” ⁵⁰ and reperforming an original act of rebellion against the master’s orchestration of ignorance; (3) repeating the operation two or three times a week, in order to achieve literacy and rhetorical prowess that could eventually lead to institutional freedom. ⁵¹ Douglass did not “transform” a fundamentally conservative tradition so much as reject the privileged classes’ ownership of asceticism by incorporating it into an entirely different program, poaching it for his own purposes. What differentiates aristocratic and resistance ascesis is not necessarily the nature of the practices themselves, which can easily circulate between political groups and be reincorporated in new and opposing political practices (philosophical training, military training, or even yogic training have circulated in this way). ⁵² The distinction is primarily in (a) the aristocratic desire to keep a close guard on practices that provide social capacities—Mr. Auld, for example, was ferociously opposed to Douglass’s learning to read ⁵³ —and (b) their ability to do so given their self-reinforcing social privilege, which stands in distinction to (c) the oppressed, who must find ways to invent spaces and practices in the interstices of a life already full of domination and humiliation. At stake, too, are different modalities and finalities: dominating better and refusing domination; struggling against and struggling for social justice; gaining ascendancy and creating community.

Some of the first theories of asceticism emerged in the field of rhetoric, where Isocrates differentiated askesis from traditional paideia: rhetorical training is about embodying reflexes and not merely learning contents of knowledge. Douglass was a student of classical oratory, and Sabbath School is clearly ascetic in the sense that it not only imparts objective knowledge to readers but also transforms them subjectively—including, crucially, by generating a realization of belonging to a community deeply bound by structural antagonism and historical trauma. The ascetic dimension lies in both the rituality and the performative effects of reading/reciting/training, which creates readers in/and a collective.

As Daniel Royer points out, “community is [. . .] the very means of Douglass’s literacy”; it forms the intersubjective basis of his new identity. ⁵⁴ Thanks to a horizontal and friendly recognition, Sabbath school revives the “socially dead” by breaking the mental and physical chains of white supremacism. In it, emancipation becomes a collective striving. The acme of this intersubjective conception of freedom is the assertion according to which

We [Douglass and his fellow-slaves] were linked and interlinked with each other. I loved them with a love stronger than anything I have experienced since. [. . .] I believed we would have died for each other. We never undertook to do anything, of any importance, without a mutual consultation. We never moved separately. We were one, and as much so by our tempers and dispositions, as by the mutual hardships to which we were necessarily subjected by our conditions as slaves. ⁵⁵

The lexicon of “consultation,” “hardships,” and “mutuality” directly refers to a resistant demos defined by a particularly edifying and enabling form of heteronomy. Anchored in the oft-despised capacity of feelings, Douglass reveals love and care as the conditions of possibility of rational agency itself. The collective that arises from this ascetic training is, in turn, the soil from which the new agential “individual” of Frederick Douglass arises; it is the subject of a collective (re)creation of the self that was previously smashed and broken by the dehumanizing institution of slavery. “You have seen how a man was made a slave, you shall see how a slave was made a man,” Douglass said famously. ⁵⁶

Hopefully it is not only about “becoming a man.” Feminist thinkers and activists have also thoroughly demonstrated the liberational prospects of refuge and of the care-of-self-and-other. Among the contemporaries of Douglass, the most obvious case is undoubtedly Harriet Tubman, who used the Underground Railroad as a means of enabling slaves to escape to the North while protecting them from the daily lethal violence of the private property regime. The railroad itself was part of the longer tradition of marronage in which slaves sought refuge in jungles, bushes, and mountains to revive a shattered social life. ⁵⁷ However, as discussed previously, abolition by no means signaled the end of racial oppression, and many of Tubman’s epigones continue to practice these politics of refuge to survive the so-called oldest democracy in the world. One of the most famous representatives of this Black radical tradition is Audre Lorde, who theorized the extent to which self-preservation as a Black woman with cancer is all at once a direct resistance against the biopolitical racism of the modern state and a condition for the production of new collectives in which mutual care becomes, in turn, the condition of possibility of continued self-care. ⁵⁸ In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, refuge also takes the form of a concrete heterotopia in which the two female characters are eventually able to recover their stolen womanhood. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Ida B. Wells, and Sojourner Truth—who used her impressive skills in the art of oratory to criticize the exclusion of Black women from nineteenth-century American feminist movements ⁵⁹ —are all evidence of the obvious fact that the fight against domination should not be apprehended as a male privilege. They also forecast modern analyses suggesting that the end of colonialism should prompt a reassessment of conventional understandings surrounding “masculinity” and “femininity.” ⁶⁰ It is a crucial point, and we insist that liberation asceticism must leave behind the typical androcentrism at the heart of its Greco-Roman counterpart—depicted by Hadot and Foucault, among others—to be truly radical.

Read together, Douglass and Morrison also point us beyond the literal space of heterotopias and toward literature as—at the very least metaphorically—a robust place of refuge. Reading and writing are at the same time spiritual practices that offer a relation of reflexive distance nearly absent from carceral societies and virtual spaces in which one can recover one’s humanity. These autobiographical and fictional efforts are a distinctive form of “parrhesia”: it is by saying the truth that Douglass could once again become subject of his own experience. As for Morrison, who wrote to recreate a collective lost past, the “we” or the “I” do not precede but succeed the narrative. On a more pragmatic level, literacy also allows Douglass to engage politically, publicize his thought, and both practice and demonstrate his rhetorical prowess—so that it becomes difficult to determine whether literature constitutes political training or politics itself. Literature is a laboratory of resistance, in which an insurgent demos gathers, produces, and manifests its power.

The Ashram, or Asceticism and the Anticolonial Diet

Gandhi was another radical activist who quite expressly deployed the notion of a “laboratory” of resistance. ⁶¹ He experimented constantly on himself and gave his experiments an objective form in the institution of the ashram: something like an ideal-typical ascetic university. The ashram was radically open—women and (then so-called) “untouchables” took part, and tuition was on the basis of ability to pay—and joining them was a voluntary choice; internally, however, they were highly constraining of one’s gestures and employments of time in order to enable a great degree of self-overcoming. They included practices typically associated with asceticism, such as the reduction of consumption and adornment to a minimum. But the ashrams were also ascetic in the broader sense that they required a rigorous daily training in the interest of producing new abilities (including the ability for self-mastery via the systematic reduction of desires). A demanding and hourly schedule was imposed—consisting largely of labor and prayer—and pranayama (breath control exercises) and physical training were also included. Postural yoga, for example, was considered by Gandhi a promising exercise because it offered “a nonviolent means of physical training which would enable satyagrahis to tolerate extreme cold and heat, stand guard for hours, withstand beatings, and nurse others.” ⁶²

The ashram required a vow of fearlessness, and its practices were intended to really jettison fear—perhaps the strongest tool in the colonial arsenal—from the body. The absence of fear makes nonviolent resistance possible, with all of the exceptional courage and patience that it requires, and ascesis, in turn, makes fearlessness possible. As Gandhi says: “It takes a fairly strenuous course of training to attain to a mental state of non-violence. In daily life it has to be a course of discipline though we may not like it, like for instance the life of a soldier.” ⁶³ And yet for all its talk of self-overcoming and the soldier’s ethic, Gandhi’s asceticism importantly excludes the will to dominate the dominator in turn: It entails such a reduction of desire as to render domination superfluous, each person being uninterested in having more than necessary for survival and spiritual progression.

Uday Mehta is no doubt correct to note that, for Gandhi, the moral rectitude of his practices had absolute priority over their possible political use. ⁶⁴ Indeed, because the spiritual subtends the political, the rectification of one’s “moral hygiene” is a radical gesture in and of itself. ⁶⁵ Yet the ashrams had a method and an “object[ive]”—the express goal that its members should “qualify themselves” for service of the country. ⁶⁶ Gandhi abhorred the idea that satyagraha could be rendered as “passive resistance,” since it actually requires a hypervigilant training activity and a strenuous moral effort ⁶⁷ —and an ashram is the heterotopia in which this moral effort is rationally elaborated and tested. If not a “mere” means to a particular political end, the ashram is nonetheless a means to a means: the subjectivity it produces is a germ from which could sprout a myriad of well-ordered—yet intentional and effective—political actions while being, perhaps most importantly, healthy in and of itself. ⁶⁸

To name just a few examples: the salt march was intended really to damage the British economy and its monopoly over a crucial industry but must also be inscribed in the broader ascesis of walking, which Gandhi practiced in order to gain endurance while internalizing the steady, energetic pace of life that he opposed to the industrial world’s agitating acceleration. ⁶⁹ Likewise, Gandhi’s insistence on the use of clothing spun on one’s own handloom is a direct political response to what he considered “India’s most urgent problem”—namely the “growing starvation of her millions, which is chiefly due to the deliberate destruction by alien rule of her principal auxiliary industry of hand-spinning.” ⁷⁰ But in addition to restoring the local economy and cutting off the flow of profit back toward “the mills of Manchester,” spinning was to create an embodied ethos of sovereign self-mastery through an ascesis akin to the regimented self-control of physical fitness practices. ⁷¹ It was also an anticapitalist spiritual exercise in that it inculcated a deep sentiment of equality and communal belonging (Gandhi thought that every single person, man and woman, rich and poor, ought to spin their own cloth daily). The charkha (spinning wheel) was thus a means of damaging the British monopoly on cloth, a means of resuscitating local economies, and an autopoietic practice all at once. ⁷² We could also mention Gandhi’s ascetic dietary practices, intended to inculcate a radical self-control that, at the same time, rids practitioners of those desires that enable the system of capitalist accumulation and its hierarchical structures. The ability to live on a meager diet reduces fear of the loss of wealth and increases confidence in one’s own powers of self-mastery, while at the same time directly reducing the force of the colonizer, which depends on the continued consumption of industrial products in the colonies. ⁷³ In other words, Gandhi’s asceticism is a kind of political realism: ⁷⁴ He was an astute observer of the techniques of power used by the British to maintain their domination, and he sought to explode the current forms of social and political relations by which they governed India. In Gandhi’s case, this meant training into an ethos that would simultaneously weaken British dominance at the root, give Indians the capacity to directly (and nonviolently) resist this dominance, and, moreover, create capacities required for a future self-governance that avoids repeating the British way of life.

On the one hand, asceticism is the means by which one becomes apt to engage in political action, ⁷⁵ and on the other, a regime type is “a concrete expression of that soul-force [of the average individual] [. . .]. After all, a people has the government it deserves.” ⁷⁶ The components of Gandhi’s project—swadeshi (use of products produced by oneself), satyagraha (nonviolent resistance or soul-force), and swaraj (self-rule)—take on their full coherence and force when understood all at once as being and relying upon ability-qualifying ascetic rituals, embodied refusals of colonial rule, and commendable ways of being. These are inseparably collective and individual endeavors, relying on the institutionalization of a rigor toward the self undertaken in common.

But to do justice to this properly collective dimension of anticolonial struggle, we must also note a certain “elitism” at the heart of our cases and avoid a possible misunderstanding. Gandhi thought only a small handful of adepts capable of nonviolent action, ⁷⁷ and certainly the independence movement relied heavily on the personal charisma of the “Mahatma.” Douglass, for his part, speaks of making his fellows “free through my agency.” ⁷⁸ Indeed, apologies for “exceptionalism” and “meritocracy” haunt the reception of much decolonial literature. For example, a whole academic trend tends to describe Frederick Douglass’s path toward emancipation as a “self-made man” tale. ⁷⁹ A similar analysis has been applied to Harriet Tubman, frequently referred to as the “Moses of Her people.” ⁸⁰

Such approaches elide the importance of community in surviving, thriving, and resisting; indeed, we could even suspect that the reduction of communal liberation struggles to individual success narratives plays into discursive strategies to enclose them in a (neo)liberal logic and hence domesticate them. ⁸¹ Although Douglass discusses the “self-made man” status in an 1859 speech, it has to be remembered that his undeniable apology of hard labor, perseverance, and success is preceded by the observation that “there are in the world no such men as self-made men” and “that no possible native force of character, and no depth of wealth and originality, can lift a man into absolute independence of his fellowmen, and no generation of men can be independent of the preceding generation.” ⁸² Gandhi’s central faith in the ashram institution as the locus of national independence makes clear that his mode of asceticism is a genuinely collective endeavor. ⁸³ If, in the last instance, it requires that each individual self be well trained, the training of the self cannot occur except in the context of a community of training individuals, whose means and methods of training are enshrined within an institutional form, supported by mutual exhortation and collective experiment.

Undoubtedly, anticolonial resistance requires a certain exceptionalism: fracturing so tight a circle of domination requires an unusual effort and disproportionate risk. Redressing oneself requires that one draw upon a very limited set of resources to undertake a massive effort: for instance, the “everyday practices of the enslaved” must take account of a pervasive and hegemonic system of power to “restore the disrupted affiliations of the socially dead, challenge the authority and dominion of the slave holder, and alleviate the pained state of the captive body.” ⁸⁴ And those few who succeed in such a resistance are understandably liable to generate a certain charismatic force in doing so. Yet our cases are not apostles of grit; far from being entrepreneurs of freedom in the style of meritocratic neoliberalism, we maintain that enslaved and colonized “exemplary models” have actually offered a conceptual exit to the aristocracy of talent scheme by rooting their notion of individuality in a deep web of human relationships.

The Asceticism of the Oppressed

We can now formalize the central features of liberation asceticism as: (1) an ontological priority of the intersubjective; (2) space and its control (whether it be “geographical” or “virtual”); (3) and bodily and spiritual training as a self-conscious program of empowerment. As such and without further qualification, these features could, of course, be deployed easily enough in a program of dominating, humiliating, and dehumanizing. This is not the direction in which our major figures developed their liberation asceticism, and thus following Freire (2018), we add an insist upon a final feature: (4) the asceticism of the oppressed, if it is to be truly revolutionary, cannot content itself with the rise to power of new leaders in the place of the old ones in an otherwise untouched hierarchy of domination. If elitist asceticism is dehumanizing in its “humanizing” (dominating) aspirations, then liberation asceticism seeks a means of recovering a stolen humanity that does not, in its turn, repeat the old gesture of self-assertion-as-incapacitation-of-the-other.

If these ascetic practices are anticolonial, it is not because they are a bid to prove one’s “worthiness” for self-rule; we are not in the paradigm of recognition that Coulthard has so convincingly criticized. ⁸⁵ Rather, they respond directly/inversely to one of colonialism’s major techniques of domination (negative asceticism) in order to challenge the imbalances of power that enabled the imposition of this negative asceticism in the first place. Ascetic heterotopias are training spaces that, while equipping subjects with the political agency required to recover their standing in the public realm, prefigure a new configuration of that realm that does away with domination. They are training spaces that train both into new ways of living and new abilities for acting and that seek to intervene at the structural level of social domination.

Critical Theory and Liberation Asceticism: Conclusion, Limits, and Future Stakes

Colonialism and slavery involve the control of the land and of the bodies of those inhabiting that land. Domination requires bald violence and ideological-legal repression, but also the imposition of active training programs that have as their result an unwilled political incapacity and the formation of subjugated identities. The dominated have been quite aware of this feature and have sought to (re-)empower themselves precisely by taking control of their own programs and spaces of training, where they undertake a new form of practice oriented toward specific goals of emancipation. This takes the form of a panoply of concrete-somatic interventions into the real ability-grid available to actors in their fight against institutionalized domination. This training of the self, if in the last instance always anchored in the individual body of the practitioner, is by no means reducible to a “personal” practice in such a way as to position it at the antipodes of “political” practice.

This article has been an attempt to rehabilitate asceticism and to refuse off-hand dismissals of self-transformation as quietism, defeatism, or individualism. What is “political” for a second-class citizen? Or worse, for a “socially dead” one, relegated to the institutional margins? In fact, nearly everything. From clothing to food, from literature to love, life in its entirety can be changed into a struggle for survival that shuffles the private/political opposition, and where each action can either decrease or maximize rebellion energy. It is the urgent task of theorists to rebuild a family of concepts that can help us take account of the radical projects for ways of living and relating that liberalism has overlooked—or worse, despised—throughout its history.

Much of the current hostility on the left toward self-transformation stems from an equation of self-care with neoliberalism. This equation is understandable as a historical accident that marks much of the wealthy Western world: Neoliberalism has indeed promoted a robust cultural paradigm of individualistic self-improvement. But this linkage is a historical contingency and hardly a conceptual bind: Neoliberalism does not hold the monopoly on self-transformation. A study of the long history of resistance asceticism reveals alternative and radical lived experiences and ascetic traditions. Rather than retroactively reducing these struggles into so many stories about individual heroes, we can use them to undo solipsistic conceptions of self-transformation.

The asceticism of the oppressed has long served to preserve and create the different lifeforms that constitute the world. The art of resistance that we have coined “liberation asceticism” seems to be a stubborn and nearly irreducible response to the long history of colonization and genocide. It has been used in unassimilable yet comparable ways by First Nations, Afro-Caribbeans, Afro-Americans, Africans, Indians, and more to resist what Marx and Engels once condemned as the spreading of the market logic “over the whole surface of the globe.” ⁸⁶ No doubt the particular ascetic practices in question differed a great deal from one community to another. If this fact prevents us from theorizing a homogeneous, monolithic, and normative set of practices, perhaps nothing much is lost. Indeed, this very incommensurability may constitute the most revolutionary potential of this tradition, an ever-living hydra that even the most murderous capitalist states have not managed to defeat.

In an era of ongoing colonialism and slaughter, our cases can therefore remind us that hope lies even in the most dramatic contexts. Indeed, if one of the defining features of liberation asceticism is that, against all odds, it finds its way through the interstices of power to break the cycle of incapacitation and domination, it could be seen as a radical and embodied mode of critical theory: a diagnostic of and lived experiment with the limits of the present. For this reason, it also requires immense creativity, courage, and—a point that is as essential as it is prosaic—assiduous discipline to transform ourselves as the agents who both suffer and create our world.

There are also lessons here for the “less oppressed,” who—under the dehumanizing logic of racial capitalism—“benefit” from the latter. As Inés Valdez has recently argued, Western “democratic” projects have been, from their root, defined by what she calls “affective attachments” to excessive forms of wealth and comfort. Imperial democracies, historically and today, exercise regimes of exploitation as intensive and extensive as conditions allow, in the name of fulfilling unsustainable wants experienced as needs. ⁸⁷ It would be an illusion to think that democratic governments and citizens can solve the contemporary crises of human rights and environmental destruction without destroying these affective attachments in themselves, personally, collectively, and institutionally. If racialized exploitation sits firmly upon a habitus of excessive attachments provoked and reinforced for centuries by capital, this habitus must become a target for critical intervention. And the name for an intervention into a way of being, thinking, feeling, and acting is asceticism.

Though helpful as a heuristic, future research will need to further nuance the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. As Wilderson has argued, the historical structural antagonisms that took place between colonized groups should temper our optimism, and analogical analysis risks dissimulating the hyper-specific experience of distinct groups. ⁸⁸ And because tenacious asymmetries of power can emerge within resistance movements themselves, ⁸⁹ a systematic study of the overlaps and conflicts both within and between forms of asceticism as they have underpinned anticolonial, queer, feminist, anticapitalist, or anti-ableist forms of social and political resistance is a necessary next step. ⁹⁰

We are interested in an asceticism by and for the oppressed: humanizing, collective, and radical; anti-domination and nondominating. But we also realize that while this characterization is indeed rooted in the practices and self-understandings of our cases, it ultimately remains as much a regulative ideal as an empirical description. Several questions emerge from this observation: How to dissociate heroism from masculinism? Which asceticisms could ensure a version of the self that departs from the Western models of whiteness, individuality, and autonomy? Can we articulate asceticisms that refuse the simple dialectical inversion by which liberation becomes the same domination with different protagonists?

If this essay can serve as an impetus and groundwork for further studies of these and other questions, it will have served its purpose. We have discussed some cases that we take to exemplify a forgotten tradition of radical asceticism in the belief that through the rigorous reexamination of a few protagonists, the contours of a comparative political history of asceticism may emerge.