The Asceticism of the Oppressed: Anticolonial Ethics and the Politics of Collective Self-Transformation

Asceticism has a bad reputation in political and social theory—insofar as it has any reputation at all. If it is not ignored entirely, it tends to be aligned with either political elitism or political quietism. On the one hand, asceticism is often considered a special privilege of the aristocracy, which alone has the leisure to turn away from worldly affairs and cultivate the self as an aesthetic object, and thus to reproduce its dominant position in a social hierarchy that it has a strong interest in maintaining. On the other hand, theorists from Hegel to Arendt and beyond have dismissed asceticism and practices of self-transformation as a mere retreat from politics into the “inner citadel.” This article seeks to excavate and theorize a counter-tradition of political asceticism in order to demonstrate that practices of the self are not the property of the elite and indeed have been the conditions of possibility for anticolonial and anti-racist resistance struggles in highly diverse contexts. With comparative attention paid especially to M.K. Gandhi and Frederick Douglass, we argue that traditional dismissals of asceticism in political theory have missed (a) the extent to which the “inner citadel” is often the prime location for struggle left to the colonized; (b) how this inner citadel is weaponized in endeavors to train oneself into capacities of political agency; and (c) how this training-into-agency—which we call liberation asceticism —is not merely an individual but a truly collective practice.