Abstract
<jats:p>The purpose of the article is to analyze the concept of the ascetic imperative created by the American philologist Geoffrey Harpham and to determine its place in contemporary academic discourse. The novelty of the research lies in the introduction of Harpham’s ideas into Russian- language scholarly discourse. Despite their significant impact on Western religious studies, these ideas remain virtually unexamined in this context. The article presents his theory for the first time as a key stage in the post-Foucauldian turn in the study of asceticism. The results of the study show that Harpham, developing the ideas of M. Foucault, proposes to understand asceticism as a universal culture-forming mechanism based on the principle of resistance between desire and prohibition. The author analyses key elements of his concept: the archetypes of the anchorite and the coenobite as two strategies for the self-fashioning, and the interpretation of narrative as an ascetic form of discourse. As a result, the author concludes that Harpham’s universalizing theory became an intellectual catalyst which, despite criticism, stimulated the search for new, more functional definitions of asceticism in the works of subsequent researchers (R. Valantasis, O. Freiberger) and influenced the methodology of studying ascetic practices in various traditions.</jats:p>