Beyond Pleasure

Cultures of Modern Asceticism

Evert Peeters, Leen Van Molle, Kaat Wils, Evert Peeters, Leen Van Molle, Kaat Wils

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781845459871
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Asceticism, so it is argued in this volume, is a modern category. The ubiquitous cult of the body, of fitness and diet equally evokes the ongoing success of ascetic practices and beliefs. Nostalgic memories of hardship and discipline in the army, youth movements or boarding schools remain as present as the fashionable irritation with the presumed modern-day laziness. In the very texture of contemporary culture, age-old asceticism proves to be remarkably alive. Old ascetic forms were remoulded to serve modern desires for personal authenticity, an authenticity that disconnected asceticism in the course of the nineteenth century from two traditions that had underpinned it since classical antiquity: the public, republican austerity of antiquity and the private, religious asceticism of Christianity. Exploring various aspects such as the history of the body, of aesthetics, science, and social thought in several European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria and Belgium), the authors show that modern asceticism remains a deeply ambivalent category. Apart from self-realisation, classical and religious examples continue to haunt the ascetic mind.

Table of contents

• Beyond Pleasure
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction - Modern Asceticism: A Historical Exploration
• Part I - Cult Places of Authenticity
• 1 - The Performance of Redemption: Asceticism and Liberation in Belgian Lebensreform
• 2 - Asceticism and Pleasure in German Health Reform: Patients as Clients in Wilhelmine Sanatoria
• Part II - Social Regulation of Pleasure
• 3 - Moving Images and the Popular Imagination: Visual Pleasure and Film Censorship in Comparative Perspective
• 4 - ‘The Wo that Is in Marriage’: Abstinence in Practice and Principle in British Marriages, 1890s–1940s
• 5 - Asceticism in Modern Social Thought
• Part III - Aesthetics and Distinction
• 6 - Adolf Loos and the Doric Order
• 7 - Disguised Asceticism: The Promotion of Austerity in Interior Design during the Interwar Period in Flanders, Belgium
• Part IV - The Lonely Passions of Science
• 8 - The Revelation of a Modern Saint: Marie Curie’s Scientific Asceticism and the Culture of Professional Science
• 9 - Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Tractatus and the Linguistic Turn in Modern Asceticism
• Part V - Discipline in the Age of Affluence
• 10 - Necessity into Virtue: The Culture of Postwar Reconstruction in Western Europe between Asceticism and Anti-Asceticism
• 11 - Modern Asceticism and Contemporary Body Culture
• Notes on Contributors
• Index