Tag Archives: food

David Hume – Of the Standard of Taste (1757)

For the most part, Hume roles over his “subjectivism” into the world of taste, claiming that taste, existing in the realm os sentiment rather than in judgment, is relative and does not contain truth-value. However, he also makes some stronger claims: that taste can be improved with practice, that prejudice always hampers taste, that moral (mental) taste is inseparable from physical taste, that taste is involved in a process of discernment which can be rated according to its ability to recognize smaller and smaller objects.

One of the consequences is that “good sense” becomes a pre-requisite for good taste. He distinguishes between the vulgar and the refined. Strangely, the vulgar is the more capricious and varying, while the refined is that which is more common. This is the most counter-intuitive move in the essay, and it aligns processes of aesthetic judgment with sensus communis and all those forms of “reason” that were established in the treaty. Unfortunately, he does not extrapolate from the very curious observations on distance—Burke and Kant will do that.

Lastly, just to emphasize the difference with Kant, Hume is radically subjective in his description of how one comes to relate to something beautiful. For example, some people may like the sublime and others may not. In Kant, for the sublime to be recognized as sublime, the subject must undergo the mental process that condition the sublime’s emergence. Thus Hume seems less interested in the relation between subject and object than in the cultural disposition of the subject.



Page numbers refer to Miller translation (Oxford, 1970)












Lauren Berlant – “Slow Death” (2007)

Berlant explains the concept of slow-death as a way of living in this current stage of capital. It is not merely the quiet desperation of Thoreau’s community-others, but a way in which life can be lived laterally, as a self-interruption of the capital subject otherwise exhausted by the forces of capital extraction that soak up all practical energies.

[The essay] argues that in the scene of slow death, a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life, agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience, without full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering; embodying, alongside embodiment.

She uses obesity as an example of how the processes of eating have become perverted by capitalist pressures. “In the contemporary U.S. context, obesity figures as the freshest case of slow-death crisis-scandal management.”

It is a form of slow death; in fact, the only form of slow death available to many marginalized peoples.

When one African- American essayist describes the ongoing familial and cultural lure of the actually existing American four food groups (sugar, fat, salt, and caffeine), we see that morbidity, the embodiment towards death as a way of life, marks out slowdeath as what there is of the good life for the vast majority of American workers.

She points out that being-fat was always associated with the rich not the poor, and now the number of “overfed” matches the number of “underfed” people in the world for the first time. Thus an old-fashioned Malthusian argument won’t work here—where it is the excessive resources that are killing the poor and people of color. Such “excess” dovetails with a whole range of racist associations: that African American are controlled by animal appetite rather than cultivated restraint; that this excess if marked by their political “excess” or expendability, etc.

She thus points out that the obesity epidemic cannot be explained in terms of liberal concepts of individual sovereignty, choice, freedom, etc. Rather, the biopolitical state forces us to rethink the modes of agency that constitute personal change—such as healthy or unhealthy eating. Remember that for Foucault, sovereignty “is not the right to put people to death or to grant them life. Nor is it the right to allow people to live or to leave them to die. It is the right to take life or let live.” Thus much of what Berlant is arguing is that life-maintenance can in and of itself be equivalent to a form of life-building, but with the idea of construction signifying otherwise than capital modes of accretion. [Relate this to Schilleren idea of not tasting more, but of tasting differently.]

But, for most, the overwhelming present is less well symbolized by energizing images of sustainable life, less guaranteed than ever by the glorious promise of bodily longevity and social security, than it is expressed in regimes of exhausted practical sovereignty, lateral agency, and, sometimes, counterabsorption in episodic refreshment, for example, in sex, or spacing out, or food that is not for thought.

Jane Bennett – “Edible Matter” (2007)

Bennett confronts what she calls the “conquest model of consumption,” which reduces food to an inert, entirely assimilable object and thereby does not fully account its “force.” As she explains in “The Force of Things,” inertness and resistance to human appropriation is in and of itself a form of vitalism, or thing-power. She argues for food as an “actant,” borrowing the term from Bruno Latour. It refers to an object that acts or is granted activity by others within a specific assemblage. To raise food to this level, she looks at how dietary fat affects moods and cognitive dispositions and, secondly, at Nietzsche and Thoreau’s different takes on the political efficacy of diet.

She argues that, in the case of fat,

we need to bear in ming not only larger humans and their economic-cultural prostheses (agribusiness, snack food vending machines, serving sizes, microwave ovens, bariatric surgery) but also the strivings and trajectories of the fats themselves, as they vie with–or more indirectly, weaken or strengthen–human wills, practices, habits, and ideas. (138)

Food writings should attend to the active materiality of food. Michael Pollan is exemplary in this regard, since he argues that corn has used the human to evolutionarily succeed.

Nietzsche locates foodstuffs within specific assemblages of material and not-quite material things: “newspapers, politics, beer, and Wagnerian music,” for example (140). While Nietzsche will reject vegetable diet as a symptom of ressentiment, Thoreau finds that the eating of meet mortifies his imagination: a diet of berries quickens his imagination and moral sensibility. The argument here is not for particular types of diet, but instead for a view of food that grants in the status of an actant within an assemblage that cuts across the material-immaterial divide.

She points to Slow Food as a potential way of thinking about food in relation to broader ethical, cultural and political systems, but worries that it still treats food as a means to an end. Bennett tries, instead, “to [construe] food [as a self-altering, dissipative materiality] as itself an actant within an agentic assemblage that includes among its members my metabolism, cognition and moral sensibility,” and thereby work against what “modern thought” has fought to obscure: the ‘active principle’ of matter. (145)

Georg Lukács – The Theory of the Novel (1920, 2nd edition 1962)

The famous Preface begins with the anecdote concerning “individual, concreate acts of heroism,” which, in 1920, Lukács thought masked the violence of the total system of war. He asks, “Who will save us from Western Civilization?” Theory of the Novel was therefore written in a tone of despair, but also one of utopian hope. Indeed, Lukács claims that his early work was by no means conservative, but that its subversive nature was grounded on an entirely naive conception of utopia’s emergence form the rubble of capitalism. Such a view tips over into conformism, a conformism of which he directly accuses Adorno and others: they have taken up residence in the ‘Grand Hotel Abyss,”


It should be noted that the grounds of accusation revolve around a certain relation to food, taste, and subtlety. Adorno has supposedly succumbed to the very dilettantism he accuses the vulgar philistine of.

He distinguishes integrated and problematic civilizations. The current civilization is problematic (appropriate to the novel), while the Greek civilization was integrated (appropriate to the epic). Similar to Bakhtin, the novel is given the burden of strictly miming the “ruptural totality” of contemporary worlds. The epic is the genre of childish immaturity while the novel is the genre of virile maturity (71)–that is, it is capable of soberly reviewing the homelessness of it factical position.

The novel, as an assertive, form-giving endeavor, runs a double risk: either it does not fulfill the minimally sufficient demands of the form, or it is too coherent, closing the circle of signification too soon or too tightly (72).

Indeed, the novel always risks the bad infinity of pure mimesis: it therefore must assert the form of biography, submitting the subject matter to confines of a life. [Connect this to Brooks argument about Freud’s master-plot, and also to the idea of Victorian literature marking out its historical contours according to the life of Queen Victoria.]

The mode of all novels is irony. It is the form of reflecting on itself. This need for reflection is the novel’s “deepest melancholy.” Put otherwise, “Te novel is the epic of a world abandoned by God.” Irony is able to negative render those spaces from which God has withdrawn. It is a negative mysticism. Irony is the highest freedom that can be attained in a world abandoned by God. (93).





Christina Rossetti – “Goblin Market” (1875)

Tells the story of two sisters, the elder Lizzie and the younger Laura. Laura is tempted by the Goblin’s trying to sell her a bunch of exotic fruits. Lizzie holds her back but can only do so for a little while. Laura sells her hair for some fruits, but then cannot quench her appetite and the goblins disappear. She pines away. The goblins return but only Lizzie can hear or see them. To help her sister, she tries to buy some fruit, but the Goblins will only sell it to her if she eats it. They try to force-feed hear and the smashed fruits gets all over her face. They return her penny and she goes to let Laura lick her face. But the taste is bitter. She flies into convulsions and almost dies. But she recovers. Surprise! Both sisters eventually marry, bearing their own “fruit,” to whom they tell the story of the nasty goblin merchants.

Rossetti is obviously worried about the market. Part of the problem is that it is impossible merely to taste–since taste is always already implicated in a cycle of appetite that cannot be quenched on the terms set by the market. Laura becomes listless, yes, but also voracious. Can think of this as a rewriting of the Lotos-Eaters. While males can taste the pleasures of the market and afford to not work, women, in order to taste those pleasures, must bear the burden of labor that is the precondition of something like the male aesthetic dimension.

The eating of fruit as violation of the aesthetic dimension.

Contrasting figures of Eve and Mary. How does Rossetti solve the antinomy of female sexuality: portrayed as always-already fallen but require to be completely pure nevertheless. How does this connect with the discourse of the secret and with purity and virginity more broadly (in Hardy, Brontës, etc.)


T.R. Malthus – An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798)

The preface claims, “that population must always be kept down to the level of the means of subsistence” (3). He therefore asks whether it be the case that man will continue to improve infinitely, always producing more subsistence equal to the needs of the population, or whether man is condemned to oscillate between periods of happiness and periods of misery. Malthus believes the latter, but in complicated form:

The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio. (13)

However, he complicates the question of perfectibility, drawing attention to “the essential difference between an unlimited improvement, and an improvement the limit of which cannot be ascertained” (112). He uses the analogy of a plant, which comes to perfection, but then through the use of manure and other organic stimulants meant to perfect it, the symmetry is destroyed:

In a similar manner, the forcing manure used to bring about the French Revolution, and to give greater freedom and energy to the human mind, has burst the calyx of humanity, the restraining bond of all society; and, however large the separate petals have grown, however strongly, or even beautifully, a few of them have been marked, the whole is at present a loose, deformed, disjointed mass, without union symmetry, or harmony of coloring. (112)

This is a curious imposition of the ideal of beauty into what was supposed to be an economic treatise. Can analyze in terms of metonymy and metaphor. How can metaphor stem the tide of the metonym’s infinite chain of growth?

The principle of population, or “necessity,” is both regulative and stimulating: regulating the number of people, but also spurring on the naturally lazy man to create new forms of subsistence. This rather depressing outlook gets reworked in the final pages by rigorous refusal to live “in the future”: “Life is a blessing independent of a future state,” a statement supported by a quotation from Antony and Cleopatra on “infinite variety”–can always go into the discourse on Roman regulation and Egyptian bounty.

How the aesthetic becomes a means of halting the dangers of population: the aesthetic as a regulative, consolidating principle.