“A Hunger Artist”: As An Art Performance

Abstract

When Gilles Deleuze focused on Kafka’s writings, he had few words to talk about Kafka’s well-known short story,“A Hunger Artist”. Deleuze just referred to ‘fasting’as a frequent theme repeated throughout Kafka’s works (Kafka, 20). Recently, Zack Horton in an article–“Can you Starve a Body without Organs?–The Hunger Artists of Franz Kafka and Steve McQueen,” presents a different reading of the work. Horton focuses on a Deleuzian concept of “body without organs” and elaborates on the ways Kafka’s artist represents an “anti-producing body in its limit case of public self-induced starvation” to portray a “resistance to capitalist spectators”(117). Later, Horton describes the fasting of Kafka’s artist “as an oscillation between spectacle and art”(119). He uses this description largely to elaborate how Kafka’s artist “never exists as a fully autonomous body” and how “he is only an artist by virtue of his spectators”