Katie Kleinkopf (University of Louisville)
Since the advent of the linguistic turn, the field of late antique Christian asceticism has hotly debated whether or not we can access the agency of any hagiographical subjects given the totalizing narrative of the male author. Following in the footsteps of Jasbir Puar (2012), I propose that we are asking the wrong questions. Instead of focusing on the identity formation of the ascetic, we should cease asking who an ascetic was and instead examine how an ascetic functioned. To do so, we must think beyond the bounds of the modern concept of the body as container. Ascetics, I contend, were assemblages – event-spaces, or the coming-together of materialities and cultural expectations. While, in English, “assemblage” functions as a noun, the French “agencement” captures the verbal quality, in that assemblages are fluid encounters, not unchanging entities (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Phillips, 2006).
Such a conclusion is not unfounded in the ancient world. Studies of late antiquity, drawing upon phenomenology, trans-humanism, and thing theory, urge us to look for multiple substantiations or even transubstantiations of humanness (Cox Miller, 2003, 2009; Chin, 2010). As C. M. Chin has recognized, “The late ancient body… is not necessarily aligned with the late ancient person, and late ancient objects exist as potential manifestations of animate personhood.” Such a phenomenon frequently appears in early Christian asceticism, wherein various practitioners spent anywhere from days to decades of their lives hidden within a physical abode instead of interacting bodily with the world. My paper will draw upon two examples: Domnina (a Syriac ascetic described in Theodoret’s Historia religiosa) and Antony (an Egyptian ascetic whose hagiographer, Athanasius, helped to make him one of the most famous ascetics in the ancient world). Both spent decades of their lives enclosed within spaces, barring their body from view. This newly created event-space, I argue, removes the ponderance of gender from the body to envision it instead as the coming-together of observer and materiality. Much like the Schrödinger’s Cat experiment, in which the cat must be thought to be in a “superposed state” (dead/alive/dying), this ascetic assemblage enabled the creature within to pursue holiness in a way which queers the gendered and sexed expectations of the flesh. Holiness, then, was no longer solely under the purview of masculinity (Muehlberger, 2015). Domnina shed her “softness” to endure the harsh elements as her body slowly rotted away to join the mud beneath, while Anthony moaned and groaned within his chamber like a bride eagerly awaiting her groom. The hagiographer repeatedly tries to bring these assemblages back under his control by forcing his way into their spaces to reveal the “truth” of the gender performance within; however, such a moment only creates identity retroactively and ruins the experiment, shifting the assemblage into another formation entirely. By envisioning ascetics as assemblages, the agency of the author dissolves into the larger series of encounters, thus enabling us to access the function of ascetic assemblages without getting stuck on questions of individual identity.