Nourishment

A Philosophy of the Political Body

Corine Pelluchon, Justin E. H. Smith

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350073906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Ética y filosofía moral

In her new book, Corine Pelluchon argues that the dichotomy between nature and culture privileges the latter. She laments that the political system protects the sovereignty of the human and leaves them immune to impending environmental disaster. Using the phenomenological writings of French philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricœur, Pelluchon contends that human beings have to recognise humanity's dependence upon the natural world for survival and adopt a new philosophy of existence that advocates for animal welfare and ecological preservation.
In an extension of Heidegger's ontology of concern, Pelluchon declares that this dependence is not negative or a sign of weakness. She argues instead, that we are nourished by the natural world and that the very idea of nourishment contains an element of pleasure. This sustenance comforts humans and gives their lives taste. Pelluchon's new philosophy claims then, that eating has an affective, social and cultural dimension, but that most importantly it is a political act. It solidifies the eternal link between human beings and animals, and warns that the human consumption of animals and other natural resources impacts upon humanity's future.

Part One

A phenomenology of nourishment

We live from ‘good soup’, air, light, spectacles, work, ideas, sleep, etc. These are not objects of representations. We live from them. The things we live from are not tools, nor even implements, in the Heideggerian sense of the term. They are always … objects of enjoyment, presenting themselves to ‘taste’, already adorned, embellished. … The constituted … here overflows its meaning, becomes within constitution the condition of the constituting, or, more exactly, the nourishment of the constituting. This overflowing of meaning can be fixed by the term alimentation. … The world I live in is not simply the counterpart or the contemporary of thought and its constitutive freedom, but a conditioning and an antecedence. The world I constitute nourishes me and bathes me. It is aliment and ‘medium’ ['milieu'l].¹

emmanuel levinas, totality and infinity

1

Living from

Living is living from. The transitivity of this verb not only signifies that our existence is inseparable from materiality. It also designates the original character of sensing, which is our life in and with things, and cannot be confused with a faculty. To wrest sensation from the register of knowledge is not the same thing as rehabilitating it by refusing to make of it a confused idea and by recognizing in the sensible qualities – the colours of the sky, the smells of flowers, and the tastes of foods – their own value, which is to reveal the world in which we live and to reveal ourselves within it. To sense is fundamentally to be in contact with things and to feel, to enjoy in such a way that one lives the transformations of one’s relationship to the world without being able to assimilate one’s sensations, which are always particular to the events of one’s consciousness or even to perceptions which, by definition, are connected to an object.¹ To sense is to be with the world, to enjoy it sympathetically.²

To describe the human condition while taking our corporeality seriously thus amounts to continuing on the path of contesting representation, which is the aim of phenomenology since Husserl.³ However, the ‘ruin of representation’ and the end of the division that it imposes between subject and object, between consciousness and the world, are never so evident as when we envision the world as food: to affirm the nourishing character of the world is to say that it could not be reduced to a noeme, to a content constituted by the giving act of sense of a consciousness. The world is more generous than what my utilitarian appreciation suggests. More precisely it cannot be entirely constituted, since what there is that which cannot be constituted in it; what evades objectivization and science as much as it does perception is revealed by my sensations in what they have that is most particular and most gratuitous, in what is in no way subordinated in them to knowledge and does not connect up with a practical function as Heidegger’s tool does, nor yet with a need, but with pleasure. Sensation, which is thus distinguished from perception, is in the order of enjoyment. Put another way, one does not content oneself with putting the body in the place of consciousness, though it is the register of the constitution that is found to be utterly called into question.

Enjoyment

Enjoyment testifies to this surplus of the reality of the world that explains that it cannot be entirely constituted and that one can speak of it as food. It awakens the elemental structure of the world: ‘In enjoyment, the things revert to their elemental qualities’,⁴ without seeking to know whether the secondary qualities that constitute the frame of my sensations are faithful to objective reality, to a reality conceived as exterior to myself. Sensation does not target an object; it is not of the same register as knowledge and perception, which refer to a transcendent object. It has however its own truth, or rather, as Levinas says, its own sincerity, in its adherence to a content that makes me content. As in Descartes, whose philosophy of the sensible the author of Totality and Infinity welcomes, sensations allow me to orient myself in the world of knowledge and to know what is useful and convenient to me, what I love.⁵ In sensation, there is no exteriority, since I move in a universe of qualities devoid of form, which Levinas calls ‘the element’, and since the anteriority of the sensible materiality of elements to the entire ambient world is that of an affective content:⁶ sensibility bites into the element.

This ‘sinking of one’s teeth into things’, which the act of eating illustrates in an exemplary manner, expresses the capacity of that which is constituted to revert into that which constitutes, the reversal of the constituted world into a condition of my existence.⁷ Such is the specific contribution of the phenomenology of Levinas: distinguishing itself from Husserl, for whom intentionality still designates a univocal relationship that distinguishes the constituting subject from the constituted object, Levinas radically affirms the sensibility of the subject, underlining at once my dependence with respect to the world, and the generosity of this world that I constitute and in which I move.

Enjoyment, in expressing this surplus, also manifests a form of agreement or harmony between me and the world, as if it were easy to be happy, as if the happiness that we owe to it or that we have forgotten comes from it, were this easiness, this indulgence in the things that nourish us. There is pleasure because the contents that are the means of my subsistence are just as soon sought out as ends, and because ‘the pursuit of this end becomes an end in its turn’.⁸ The world is food, and the fact of eating testifies to an original relationship to things that is a relationship of enjoyment, in which it is not that I eat in order to live, but rather in which eating is living. Thus, I seek that which I need in order to live, and at the same time, since this fills me with life and satisfies me, I nourish myself on these activities that make me live. Happiness describes this independence in dependence which transforms into a sovereignty of the self, to the extent that the latter takes delight in the things that make it live: they are ‘always more than the strictly necessary; they make up the grace of life’.⁹

Of course, this happiness is troubled, since food may not be available. These contents of life, which constitute its value or underline its indigence, are not my being. They are different from my substance and I must procure them or make them through work. My happiness can thus be fragile and my existence precarious, but it should not be thought of in an originary manner as thrownness or being thrown.¹⁰ To designate the world as food and to think the alterity of nourishment is by contrast to affirm that ‘life is already loved’, and that my primary relationship to things is a relationship of enjoyment. There is a happiness attached to the simple fact of living.¹¹ The social conditions can make this happiness inaccessible or threaten it. However, the analytic of enjoyment that Levinas opposes in Totality and Infinity to the ontology of care refutes the manner in which Heidegger thinks of the primary or originary condition of a human being as tragic.

Far from denying the distress of the many billions of people suffering from hunger or malnutrition, this emphasis of the derivative or secondary character of thrownness indicts unjust social and economic organization. We will discuss this again when we turn to the global food crisis, which is not due to a shortage of resources or to a growth in population, but rather reflects the dysfunctions of our economy and underlines our political responsibility. For now, in elaborating a philosophy of corporeality that permits us to uncover those structures of existence that are often neglected by Western thinkers, it is a matter of insisting on the existential character of enjoyment.

That this should make ‘the elemental essence of the world burst forth’ testifies to the ‘permanent truth of hedonist moralities: to not seek, behind the satisfaction of need, an order relative to which alone satisfaction would acquire a value’; rather, one must ‘take satisfaction, which is the very meaning of pleasure, as a term’.¹² This truth of hedonism supposes that we do not consider the human being abstractly, cutting it off from the materiality of its existence, in order then to conceive its need as a limitation of its liberty that proves the tragic character of the human condition. When we truly take seriously the corporeality of the subject, we can no longer think about need as a simple privation, nor can we suppose that the limits placed on our power reflect our thrownness. The hedonism that flows from this philosophy of the sensible thus does not have as a background a thought that is haunted by death or by the regret that life is not such that we can enjoy it without encountering obstacles to our will.

To say that enjoying is touching the element, liberating the elemental structure of the world, is thus to introduce a hedonism that is distinct from that of Epicurus, which only obtains its sense from an obsession with the limits in which it is necessary to contain one’s desires in order not to suffer. Contrary to the ancient philosopher who makes of hedonism a wisdom, there is no question here of working on one’s representations. Nor is it a matter of sculpting one’s life, or of cultivating the art of enjoyment in order to profit from the only good within one’s reach, that is to say the present, and to offer to death ‘a body that will have burned down to the last flames’,¹³ as in Michel Onfray, for whom the Hedonist Angel, who competes with Thanatos, maintains the aspect of challenge. The hedonism about which we are speaking is not an effort of the self, nor a morality. It designates the original relationship that we have with the world and with its contents, not what we should do in order to live well. Nevertheless, what it may have in common with the hedonism of Onfray holds to the manner in which the latter invites us to bring the human being back down into its body – and even into its stomach.

It is important to extract hedonism from any morality in order to describe the relationship of human beings with the world that is expressed in sensations, in particular in taste, which of all senses is the most distant from representation. In fact, when I bite into an apple, when a bit of food sits on my tongue, and when I ingest it and incorporate it, drawing from it an energy that reinvigorates me, I am installed within a relationship to things and to the milieu that expresses a truth about the world and about me.

In order to be able to extract this truth and to formulate it, let us thus cease to see a lack in need, as if we only ate in order to fill up a void. Not only is the body, which brings us enjoyment, not an enemy, but, moreover, the world is nourishment. Happiness, even if it is a respite, given that nourishment can be lacking, is in itself an accomplishment lived in the first person, an exaltation connected to the strangeness or alterity of the elements that agree with my taste, that restore my forces, and that increase my vitality. Human life is not represented as if it were primarily and essentially a desperate path towards death. To conceive it as the execution of a programme or of a destiny no more helps us to grasp the sense of existence than to bring out the fundamental structures that permit us to illuminate our being-in-the-world, which is a being-with-things and a habitation of the earth.

To think of enjoyment as an existential is to discover a gourmet ego, which is also a gourmet cogito, for which need is not primarily a care for existence, but a need of nourishment that includes at once the pleasure taken in nourishment, and then also the search for this pleasure and for that which can make it more intense or more subtle. We are thus the closest to our reality, to its concreteness – which etymologically designates that which makes us grow and which constitutes us.

This attachment to nourishment, which is an attachment to the world – of which we will also analyse the difficulties, notably where there is a question of anorexia or bulimia – resembles a game. It expresses the generosity of life and the energy that we place in living, beyond the battle against death. Watching young animals or young children play, Ricœur writes, we get the idea that life begins beyond danger, beyond balance, and that it is generous: ‘Perhaps for the living being this is a manner of being which surpasses deathlessness.’¹⁴ Our original relationship to the world is not characterized by negativity but by enjoyment, which is a sort of ‘carefreeness with regard to existence’.¹⁵ To live is to ‘play, despite the finality and tension of instinct to live from something without this something having the sense of a goal, … simply play or enjoyment of life’.¹⁶

Even if taste in the culinary arts and in gastronomy is educated in the search for refined pleasures that elevate us above our primary reality and our animality, it is important not to forget the connection between pleasure and happiness, between appetite and the desire to live. It is equally necessary to not misunderstand this sort of confidence in the nutritive character of the world, which we have from the beginning and which the fact of living originally designates. The sight of the newborn drinking the milk of its mother, concentrating on the breast or on the feeding bottle, and putting all of its being, all of its soul, into sucking, gives an idea of what the original confidence in life, which implies an adhesion to its contents, could be. This greedy character of the newborn, which we also find in animals, its imperious call telling of a hunger, and a thirst that must be appeased, as if it were imperative that the world satisfy them without delay, this hunger, and this thirst that go beyond the need to ingest a nutritive substance without which it would perish, this peace, finally, that it feels after having eaten, and that is more than the simple fact of having the stomach filled testify to our primordial relationship to the world. They illustrate the immersion of our sensibility in the element and the agreement that we expect to find at first glance between our needs and the world.

Enjoyment ‘consists in sinking [my] teeth fully into the nutriments of the world, agreeing to [agréer] the world as wealth’,¹⁷ knowing myself to be originally in the world that offers to me the contents from which I live. The suckling baby incarnates this life in the element that is sensibility. In enjoyment, I cause to burst forth the elemental essence of the world, its tastes that evade representation, concepts, and in general the register of constitution, and I know that life, whatever the obstacles it encounters and the dangers that stalk it, is love of life. Living is living from, and living from is enjoying.

The gourmet cogito

To think of a gourmet ego behind the thinking subject, more imperious than the Dasein with its care for existence, more immersed in the element, and more profoundly connected to the living world than permitted by the representation of the self as freedom, is not only to restore to sensorial certainty its truth. It is also to appreciate anew the place of each of the five senses. This gourmet ego, in view of the connection between the senses and the spirit, is at once a gourmet cogito. To the primacy accorded in the philosophical tradition to vision and to touch, we will oppose the fact of tasting the world. To taste and to smell we must add the description of what it means, for each of us, to breath, to feel the wind on our skin, to be cold or hot, and to be situated on earth.

This taking into consideration of our corporeality, grasped in its thickness and its materiality, in what Levinas calls its ‘ontic charge’, more nocturnal than any representation, than any constitution of a phenomenon appearing in full light in the external world, does not imply that we become our sensations. If the world is not relative to my representation, if it is not entirely constitutable and decipherable from the standpoint of the giving act of a consciousness that would cause it to appear as an object of knowledge, if it is not completely visible, but recedes from the implicit horizons that my sensations permi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• Part One A phenomenology of nourishment
• Part Two To institute a common world
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright