eating disorder – Little Bristling Soul

The Anorexic Self: A Personal, Political Analysis of a Diagnostic Discourse
by Paula Saukko

Unlike other kinds of addictions, anorexia disguises itself as virtue. The anorexic is a modern-day phrenologist, searching for saintliness and vice in the bone structure of strangers. She is at once insane, dying, and inhumane.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/anorexia-the-impossible-subject

Like me, the Alien is anorexic. Sometimes we talk about our malabsorption problems. Everything turns to shit. Food’s uncontrollable. If only it were possible to circumvent the throat, the stomach and the small intestine and digest food just by seeing. After several weeks, the Alien decides that he will no longer make love to me because I’m ‘not the One.’ Aliens spend their lifetimes on this planet testing, searching. They get dewy-eyed, nostalgic about hometown virgins.

Chris Kraus, Aliens & Anorexia

The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says: I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.

Jean Baudrillard, America: Vanishing Point (full text here)