Boundless restraint: Performance, reparation, and the daily practice of death in the Life of Daniel the Stylite

Abstract

This article explores how graphic imagery in the Life of Daniel the Stylite constructs a specular regime that operates performatively to convey particular attitudes toward death and the physical body’s integrity and boundaries. Unlike most vitae that traffic in images of pain and suffering, the gruesome fates depicted in this one are reserved not for Daniel, the holy protagonist, but for those who witness him. Triangulating the text of the Life with Patricia Miller’s work on ‘visceral seeing’ and ascetic performance and Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic conception of subject formation, the essay argues that Daniel’s simultaneously mild and spectacular asceticism shifts the burden of performance onto his viewers and readers, depicting and scripting an imperative that all of Daniel’s audience members effect a reparative position in order to conquer anxieties about death and dissolution. Through a constant shuttling back-and-forth between what Klein would call the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (as executed by Daniel’s performance), we are best able to see how Daniel’s Life speaks to early Christological debates and concerns over the nature and veneration of icons.