Desert Asceticism and "The Body from Nowhere"

This essay is an exploration of an apparent conundrum in reports about the desert ascetics of the fourth and fifth centuries, in which emaciated and mutilated bodies were seen as angelic bodies. Drawing on a theory of the construction of visual perception as well as on theories drawn from performative ritual in contemporary arts, the essay argues that the ascetic view of the human body oscillated between two modes of visual perception, one that marked its defects and one that marked its "angelic" qualities. Further, ascetic practices are viewed as performative ritual acts that induce the perceptual construction of ascetic bodies as bodies of plenitude. Ascetics' performative uses of their bodies, in other words, changed the conditions within which they were perceived.