The essay proposes a reading of one of Kafka’s last short stories, A Hunger Artist, as an interpretive key to understanding some contemporary art practices marked by the poetics of silence, absence, subtraction, exile and isolation. Through an analysis of the reflections on gesture as a pure medium elaborated by Benjamin, Adorno and Agamben, the figure of the faster, like those of the trapeze artist and of the mouse Josephine the songstress, at the center of the Prague writer’s last literary collection, delineate a performative practice that shifts the center of gravity of art from aesthetics to ethics, toward an art of living and everyday behaviour. The art of the faster, in Kafka’s tale, assumes the character of a somatic-spiritual and ascetic technique, capable of suspending subservience to the natural impulse of hunger, loading itself with possible ethical-political meanings and regaining the original meaning of the artistic event. The bulimic collecting and enormous appetite of the protagonist of Balzac’s last great novel, Cousin Pons, represent, on the other hand, the mirror reversal of the ascetic fasting of Kafka’s character and underscore another fundamental character of modernity: the impulse to accumulate signs, objects, and works in front of which is mirrored the silent withdrawal of the faster.

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How to cite (Chicago style citation):

Bertolini, Michele, “L’arte del digiuno: gli ultimi racconti di Franz Kafka. Con un’appendice su Balzac”, no.1 (2023), pp. 155-173

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