Whitehot Magazine

Book Review of Bite Your Friends by Fernanda Eberstadt

Still image from Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1975 film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom

Cady Noland, Untitled (Walker) (1989) Walker, basket, American flag, pole with wheel

By JOSEPH NECHVATAL July 22, 2024

In the tradition of Georges Bataille’s incisive and philosophically challenging book Les larmes d’eros (The Tears of Eros, Peter Connor, 1989, City Lights Books)––which spins an erotic-deadly web strung between child killer Giles de Rais, serial killer Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed (aka Erzebet Bathory), the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, Andre Breton, Voodoo practitioners, and Chinese torture victims––Bite Your Friends: Stories of the Body Militant is a studious-yet-sensual meditation on exuberant art and the transgressed body and whatever the politics are that interpret those bodies as a valuable commodity.

New York City-born and current French resident Fernanda Eberstadt tells the tale in Bite Your Friends of some of those whose bodies were made into artistic-political sites of cultural resistance––poised against the supposed world of as-it-is.

But what is the world-as-it-is? What is this supposed rock-hard political reality principle?

Eberstadt finds it in the artist as object. And in herself, as slippery subject. She, and hence the reader, look at the artist’s body and story as an objet d’art––set within her binary subject/object cognition. Indeed, the splitting of the subject from the object is a crucial mechanism for the defensive organization of the artistic ego at its most basic (pre-oedipal) level. But the subject/object questions pursued in this book appear as a too binary positioning. Art is where subject/object meet and mix. Good art, like Cady Noland’s 1989 Untitled (Walker) (1989) assemblage, invites subject’s imagination to be drawn into and participate with the art object. We imagine MAGA minds (or ours) making use of Untitled (Walker). Not just looking AT it. Noland’s subject/object set functions more along the dialectical lines of a magnet, where the north pole exists only by virtue of the south pole (as is the contrary). Like the supposed subject/object opposites, neither pole exists in isolation.

That’s not to say that Eberstadt’s book is not excellent in what it does, which is give example of artistic bodies self-used as agents of anarchy, protest and change. It is good particularly when she briefly explores how philosopher Michel Foucault’s homosexuality made him the target of state violence at the hands of the Tunisian police, and how while teaching at UC Berkeley in the 1970s he experiences both the unifying effects of LSD and the sadomasochistic subculture, believing its anonymity provided freedom from identity, which he viewed as “a reflection of the state’s... control over the individual.” Yikes. Here I found it an inadequate omission that Eberstadt did not dip into some meditations on Foucault’s critical study, Death and the Labyrinth, about Raymond Roussel: French poet, play-write, weird novelist, neurasthenic, dandy, drug addict, probable suicide, and above all an eccentric whose immense riches allowed him to indulge his most outrageous whims, but who spent most of his life secreted in his darkened study producing works whose strangeness remains unsurpassed.

Eberstadt, who has published five novels and one non-fiction book about Rom musicians in Southern France––and who writes cultural criticism for publications including The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Vogue, Frieze, Salon, Granta, Literary Hub––makes the best case for artists who have used their own wounded or stigmatized bodies to challenge society. The first part on performance artist Stephen Varble is absolutely informative and engaging and true, as I can attest through my occasional visual encounters with him in the streets of SoHo in the mid-70s. The author’s friendship with Varble was exceptionally close (for a time) and thus her information exceptionally valuable. I can recommend this book for this chapter alone.

Eberstadt grew up in the counter-cultural No Wave New York of the late-70s, surrounded by such courageous artists as Varble and writers, as her father was a fashion photographer and her mother a glamorous 60s writer and Warhol Factory friend, particularly close to the film director Jack Smith. (A grandfather, btw, was the poet Ogden Nash.) So we can learn a lot about Eberstadt’s evolution into a cultural critic who is interested in those who bend societal norms to their breaking point. Her own story emerges here along with the story of her mother whose illness-scarred (once beautiful) body led Eberstadt to seek connections between psychic and bodily pain and visual beauty. This interesting oxymoron places the reader in close connection to the ecstasy tradition of Catholic imagery, where erotic sensuality meets at the point of near death––such as in Guido Reni’s painting St Sebastian (c.1615-16), the painting (in reproduction) that had such a strong effect on the Japanese poet Yukio Mishima.

Guido Reni, St Sebastian (c.1615-16) Palazzo Rosso, Genoa. Oil on canvas, 146 x 113 cm

 Greg Day photo of Stephen Varble in Elizabethan Farthingale (1975) courtesy The Horse Hospital, London

Anonymous, photo of Raymond Roussel (undated)

Piotr Pavlensky, Segregation, Moscow, October 2014

Pussy Riot (Таганский суд) photo by Denis Bochkarev (2012)

Something of a re-mix compendium, Bite Your Friends features Eberstadt’s interviews with the Russian punk feminist group Pussy Riot, and the political performance artist Piotr Pavlensky. Besides some passing admirations for David Wojnarowicz, there is a particularly self-questioning chapter on Pavlensky, whose masochistic work supposedly protests the Russian state through public self-mutilation (he once nailed his scrotum to the ground in Moscow’s Red Square). Revealed in riveting detail is Eberstadt’s deep disappointment with Pavlensky, who is discovered to also be a very active wife beater. Happily, good ol’ Pussy Riot offers Eberstadt (and the reader) a much more enticing (and fun) strategy for engaging an art of noise that uses civil disobedience as a collective political action.

Elsewhere, Eberstadt perhaps too briefly, discusses ideas around the fourth-century Greek philosopher of self-degradation Diogenes (also known as Diogenes the Cynic), who lived homeless and free and dirty like a wild animal in the public square. It is from him whom she drew the title of her book.

“I bite my friends to heal them.”

–Diogenes (c. 350 BCE)

As it is a (mini) history of the body as a site of resistance to power, and a subversive memoir, also name checked are the 3rd century Christian martyr-saints Perpetua and Felicitas, who cruelly died (so much for the resistance) while remaining defiant in their Christian faith even when faced with execution at Carthage for refusing to sacrifice to the Roman gods.

I liked the fact that the text weaves in and out of such historical stories and Eberstadt’s own personal story, including life in the Southern French countryside during Covid-19 lockdown during the early-2020s. That should have produced an anti-subject/object mind-set effect, but didn’t. At times it all becomes too personal––thus a tad boring to read––as the author struggles to create an engaging the-personal-is-political alternative memoir that examines herself in the context of the other––her artist subjects––all of whom outstrip her in accentuating how the fragile human body can be bravely utilized in forms of shock art as political protest.

But her book ends well by touching hands with Georges Bataille. She takes a long look at Pier Paolo Pasolini that climaxes with an examination of his most notorious and final film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975). Set in northern Italy during the last days of Mussolini’s fascist reign, Salò liberally adapts the Marquis de Sade’s book 120 Days of Sodom, using the tale of amoral libertines who kidnap young victims and strip them naked for a sacrificial orgy meant to launch a ruthless attack on modernity. Setting up equivalences between Sadean sexual license (there is much explicit nudity and images of sexual sadism), Italian fascism and consumerist alienation, Salò is a tough view, I assure you, but as Eberstadt explains it, Salò delivers a trenchant political allegory that I find very applicable to American politics today.

That said, Bite Your Friends is also certainly fun and fascinating––you won’t mind being bitten––and it does provide a needed focus on some lesser-known transgressive artists from whom the reader may branch out of (and get into) for artistic inspiration. More widely, Bite Your Friends poses crucial questions about what drives certain individuals to risk physical suffering in the name of fame or freedom. Drop on some Iggy Pop & The Stooges and give it a read. WM

Joseph Nechvatal

Joseph Nechvatal is an American artist and writer currently living in Paris. His The Viral Tempest limited edition art LP was recently published by Pentiments Records and his newest book of poetry, Styling Sagaciousness: Oh Great No!, by Punctum Books. His 1995 cyber-sex farce novella ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~venus©~Ñ~vibrator, even was published by Orbis Tertius Press in 2023.

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