Exhausted, done in and well fed, the six philosophers bring their banquet to an end, leaving behind the remnants of a significant meal. Diogenes has reminded us that we cannot make Nature our guiding principle without a thorough understanding of food. Holding aloft an octopus, he once more speaks of the Cynical demand for simplicity, and the rejection of the sophisticated, the complex and the civilized. After hosing down every fire he can reach with a great stream of urine – like his confrère at the dinner of Lucian of Samosata – the philosopher of the amphora denounces once again the Promethean dimension at work in the real. Nothing good is to be found outside the natural, he explains. Convinced by the brilliance of his excoriating speech, he grabs the human flesh that is lying on the ground and sits down, giving the floor to the next speaker.
Close by, looking interested and a little neurasthenic, Rousseau rises to speak. He begins by citing points of agreement with his predecessor – the rejection of the complex, praise of the simple, the will of nature. But he also recalls his opposition in principle to eating any flesh – whether cooked or raw. Milk will always suffice for those who turn away from the world. Plebeian to the point of caricature, the citizen of Geneva extols the virtues of a life modelled on the movements of a nature raised to the mythical level of perfection. Fantasizing about Sparta, Rousseau develops a theory of food somewhat reminiscent of the social contract – asceticism and sobriety, the absence of whimsy and chance. A dream of order with simple machines with uncomplicated mechanisms. The virtues of kindness, milk and nature are promoted over cruelty, meat and civilization. The dream against reality. It does not take much for such a fantasy to become reality. In 1789 the bloody proponents of a vegetarianism raised to the level of a republican virtue violently led their citizens to a spartan diet and political forms. The Lacaedemonian model as the outcome for modernity – there is plenty there to trouble a Voltairian adherent of the free circulation of ideas, and plump young chickens.
Like a good student, silent and keen to learn, Kant is taking notes with a glass in his hand. He has been keenly savouring the speech of the Genevan. Kant regards a little alcohol as the best way to promote and maintain the conviviality and ambience of banquets. Less of the syssitia and more of the feast. Re-reading his notes, he concludes that some of Rousseau’s analyses are cogent. In the pedagogical, anthropological and historical texts of the old master of Königsberg can be found overt echoes of Emile and some other works of the Swiss. We can be surprised to find Kant, whom we would expect to be sober, austere and pathologically hypochondriac, dead drunk in the streets of his Prussian city. Königsberg is now the Russian city Kaliningrad. No doubt, in this Russian province, Kant’s habit of occasionally staggering around the streets of the port at night has been kept up.
At the turn of the century, with the French and industrial revolutions, we would have had to say something about Brillat-Savarin or indeed Grimod de La Reynière. The former is rather sceptical and questioning, even at the table, because he is writing a book – The Physiology of Taste – which is at once philosophical, sensualist and literary. Condillac and Maine de Biran are not far off. The gastronome’s analysis draws on multiple disciplines: physiology, medicine, chemistry and hygiene, and sometimes geography or ethics. Brillat-Savarin opens up the era of writers whose focus is food. That is true. But it is also through him that pleasure is no longer seen to be something shameful. The book clearly stakes its success on eudemonia, endlessly arguing for the superiority of pleasure. He creates its theory, its logic and its poetics. Tasty brother-in-law of Charles Fourier, he is the philosopher who dared to think about the senses, and particularly about taste. Before him we might wonder whether philosophers have a nose and a palate;1 sometimes even whether they are simple machines devoid of senses – insensate in fact – automatons like those of Vaucanson, with no more passion than cogs and gears. Brillat-Savarin is the heir to a rather discreet, though effective tradition – that of the sensualists, the libertines, the epicureans of the Grand Siècle, the materialists. He also opens new perspectives on a manifest modernity. Forced to name names, one would have to offer Ludwig Feuerbach, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. All three of these are contemptuous of the spiritualism/materialism dualism, but are also proponents of an immanent logic that works to integrate the forces, powers and vitality of a desiring machine. Equally how could we forget that, closer to us, the reflections of Deleuze and Guattari almost carry the ideas of La Mettrie to their definitive expression – or rather the ideas of a La Mettrie who had known Freud?2
We can be sure that at the philosophers’ banquet we have discovered Brillat-Savarin and Grimod de La Reynière are guests, but also La Mettrie, Sade, Margaret Mary, Gassendi, Saint-Evremond and La Mothe Le Vayer. And most likely Gaston Bachelard and Michel Serres are also in attendance.
The encounter between Margaret Mary and Sade takes place in a singular fashion. Ironically, chance has seated them face-to-face, like the symbolic expressions of two antagonistic tendencies. Strange . . . and in close proximity to the saint and the libertine we can find the fantastic and bewildering reasoning of the Gnostics – those fanatics of the desert who reject the flesh, the body. In a corner of the feast they prefer to pray. Stylites, Gyrovagues or grazers – these are the pathways to a Christianity that condemns skin, blood, meat and lymph; they are too vulgar. The cycle of ingestion/digestion, eating/defecating is for them the clearest sign of subjection to the contingent. Their model was Jesus, of whom Valentinus wrote: ‘he eats and drinks, but does not defecate. The power of his continence was such that foodstuffs did not corrupt in him, since there was no corruption in him.’3
Let us return to Margaret Mary – a saint of the Grand Siècle – and the psychoanalyst who looked into her case. This psychoanalyst was, moreover, René Major, a specialist in the delirium associated with nominative determinism.4 He pointed out that the saint’s lay name was Alacoque (‘soft-boiled egg’ in French). Seriously. We can also note that above all she hated cheese and that she put it to a mystical use, since she forced herself to eat it in spite of her repugnance.5 On her menu: multiple mortifications, denial of basic bodily imperatives, pleasure in contempt of the self, discipline, hair shirts, flagellation, lack of defecation (an obsession with the ecstatics) and refusal of food. Her preference, when she deigned to eat anything, was for foods that were marginal – to say the least! You be the judge; she particularly enjoyed the bitter potions prescribed by her doctor.6 The more disgusting the taste, the longer she put off swallowing, and the more she savoured it. She also ate ‘the food that a sick person was unable to keep down; and another time, while caring for a nun with dysentery [she touched] with her tongue the very thing that turned her stomach’.7 When a plate was dropped on the ground and the meal was thrown in the dirt, she kept the dirtiest morsels for herself.8
Happily, her chance companion, the divine Marquis de Sade, is at the same banquet. For the saint, eating is a way of fulfilling the contempt of the self; for the libertine it is an argument for the expansion of desires and pleasures. The familiar of the Bastille, the man with sweets plates filled with cantharides-flavoured treats, has a remarkable appetite. Carefully drafting the standing rules of the Society of the Friends of Crime, he writes (in Article 16): ‘Every excess of eating and drinking is authorized . . . every possible measure is furnished to satisfy them.’9 As always with erotomaniacs, food is subjected to sex – it restores the body from sexual exertion or prepares for it. In contrast to the mystics, who call for abstinence, de Sade incites excess – feasts, orgies and culinary celebrations are combined. Every moment of sexual initiation is celebrated through eating. The Sadeian religion of the digestive drink celebrates the two terms of this dialectic – ingestion/defecation. Faeces is sanctified in the marquis’ theory of gastronomy; it is the teleological moment of nutrition.
Missing from the fanatics of ecstasy, faeces could not be more present among the sensualists. The geography of excrement as it appears in the 120 Days of Sodom is suggestive in this respect. The platitude whereby extremities meet in the end is verified by lining up the gnostic or religious experiences of Margaret Mary with those of de Sade. Let Noëlle Châtelet provide the catalogue:
Turning through the pages . . . you will note with growing discomfort the succession of unexpected ingestions, from snot to embryos, by way of saliva, pus, sperm, farts, menstrual blood, tears, belches, pre-chewed food, and vomit.10
Nothing is wasted.
Who among those invited to the banquet could match him for omnivorousness? Diogenes perhaps. It is true that the Marquis’ interests in food are a bit like those of Diogenes – not so much natural as counter-cultural or anti-cultural. He transgresses alimentary prohibitions in order to profit from libertarian ingestion. Nothing can contain or limit its possibilities. In the kingdom of Sadean festivity, nothing is prohibited. This is how coprophagy, murder or cannibalism can come into the picture.11 And equally where vampire-like practices come from, and other scenarios that meet the needs of hematophagic desire. And also, finally, the consumption of roasted little girl or even – to refer to Noëlle Châtelet for the list: testicle pâté, human blood sausage, turd sorbet, etc.12 Perverse, writes this shocked reader. She should reread Klossowski, Lély or Blanchot.
Sade is more talk than action. The information gleaned from his fiction must be balanced against that found in his biography and correspondence, especially his letters to his wife. Libertarianism is his concern. He does not encourage debauchery, because he knows that should it take place, it will do so necessarily. He does not encourage anthropophagy, but asserts that if it exists, it can only be a part of nature, of natural necessity. Well before Nietzsche, Sade asserts a reading of reality as a logic submitted to determinism. In Justine; or, The Misfortunes of Virtue, he writes:
Therefore, if there exist beings in the world whose tastes shock all accepted standards, not only should we not be astonished by them, not only should we not preach to them or punish them, but we should serve their interests, make them happy, abolish all restraints upon them, and if we wish to be just, provide them with every means to satisfy themselves without risk, because it was not more their choice to have strange tastes than it was yours to be witty or stupid, to have a fine figure or be a hunchback.13
Amor fati. Against nature nothing is possible . . .
Instead of a meal made of roast little girls and glacéd turds, Sade is happy with a quite innocent cuisine. The food of the fictional texts is imaginary, that of the letters is real. The food of fantasies knows no prohibitions, just as dreams know no limits. The favourite foods of this devourer of children are fowl, mincemeat, stewed fruit, marshmallow, sweets, spices, sweet milky treats, jams, meringues and chocolate cakes. Play lunch for a good little girl. Fresh meat has scarcely any attraction for him and he occasionally enjoys the refinements of champagne and truffles. A letter to his wife reveals the secrets of Sadean gastronomy:
A bouillon made from twenty-four small sparrows, with rice and saffron. A pie with meatballs made from minced pigeon meat and garnished with artichoke bottoms. A vanilla cream. Truffles à la Provençale. A turkey stuffed with truffles. Eggs in gravy. Mince made from the white meat of partridge stuffed with truffles and fortified wine. Wine from Champagne. A compote perfumed with ambergris.14
Sade lives more on the margins through writing, in his novels, than through eating, in daily life. Would you prefer an invitation from Margaret Mary or Sade? The former, Alacoque, is more startling at the table – if one may say so – than the citizenmarquis. Instead of the blood of a prepubescent on his lips, the only traces Sade has on the corners of his mouth are the remains of the cocoa on his favourite cakes. The same cannot be said of the brown marks around the mouth of the saint.
Charles Fourier, his head in the clouds, as oblivious of his neighbours’ monstrous writing as he is of their shop-girl behaviour, makes a case for a poetics of food. Copulation of stars to produce fruit, gastrosophical wars, a dialectic of the pie and a rhetoric of the vol-au-vent, the utopian rhapsodizes about kitchens as much as factories. Engrossed by a mythical Harmony, Fourier does not overlook food in his desire to lock down every aspect of the real. Fanatical about green plants to the point of living in an apartment converted into a greenhouse – the floor of his house was covered in soil – this philosopher of the new order put as much effort into developing his gastronomic ideas as in specifying his political thought or the details of his political economy. It is true that gastrosophy is a pivotal science. On his credit side, Fourier’s genuine concern to change one’s relationship to the body must be acknowledged. His main aim was the removal of guilt, and his first desire was living utopia to the full. Harmony is the political form given to joy.
Nose in the stars, Fourier does not see Nietzsche slaving away like a drudge. Several hours – up to ten – every day. He knows the path he follows by heart. His eyesight is too poor for him to be able to improvise with confidence. Mountain tracks are dangerous. Nietzsche’s relationship with food tells us everything about the man and the philosopher. He produced a wonderful oeuvre in which some arguments are nevertheless mired in resentment. He wanted to have a partner or friend, and, disappointed by his fruitless wait, launched into misogynist and misanthropist diatribes. Zarathustra advocates taking a whip on each visit to a woman, but his master and creator intervened with the authorities to support the right of a woman to submit her doctorate – something that was not allowed at the time. Similarly, he confided an idea or two by way of letter to some women, such as Malvida von Meysenburg. It was the same with the friendship with Gast that was so reviled by Zarathustra, and was such an important part of Nietzsche’s life: without Gast there would never have been a great Nietzschean oeuvre because of the shocking state of his eyesight. Peter Gast read and re-read, corrected and edited the definitive manuscripts for the author to approve. He took in Nietzsche in Venice, and came to his aid whenever he needed help. What is this if not friendship? Notwithstanding, he sees any special kind of relationship as a prison. Do we need another example? The success that he awaits in vain generates the resentment that makes him declare that he is writing for future generations, for the next century. You could say the same thing about food. He rejects German heaviness and related foods, but only to throw himself into incoherent practices to do with some Piedmontese fantasy. He is interested in light-footedness and dance, so is fond of meats with sauce and pasta, but then he confines himself to the practicalities of his mother’s sausages.
Marinetti pushes the consequences further. Futurist theory is put into practice. Marinetti’s banquets really took place – as kitsch works of art, baroque scenarios. They were eloquent and energetic in their will to give the real a form starting from the pure moment in time, with all the residue of the past removed. Futurist gastronomy is seeking a culinary revolution, even if, here as elsewhere – in the way of these things – revolution turns into reaction. Once again the laws of history govern the saga of food. The history of alimentation is history pure and simple. The determination of a gastronomic sensibility or an eating behaviour is purely and simply the determination of a sensibility or a behaviour.
Finally, with Sartre, food designates the philosopher as the eternal enemy of his body. At one point his alcoholism is in competition with a Russian engineer in Tashkent, the next with Hemingway at the Ritz. He ends up sleeping it off in the life-boat that was the liner taking him from Le Havre to New York. When in Japan he had a taste of raw bream or bloody tuna he vomited at the end of the meal. At the house of a Maoist miner in Bruay-en-Artois, he is served a jugged rabbit for dinner that brings on a two-hour asthma crisis. In Morocco he has terrible indigestion after eating pastilla, chicken au citron, mechoui, couscous and the marrow of gazelle’s horns.15 And one evening he experiences deafness for several hours because he took some amphetamine tablets. Let us leave him in his blessed silence, and let us be wary of any philosophies that make you deaf.
Food for nothingness and for eternity, humans are destined to ingest and be ingested. Death, as an alimentary metaphor, is but one of many versions of orality. Psychoanalysts have much to say on gastronomic oppositions: stage fixation, oral pleasure, cultural and socially acceptable substitutes for weaning, sublimation defined by the ephemeral. Psychiatrists analyse anorexia and bulimia in order to discover both sides of the same failing obsession to get a grip on the world. They make peremptory distinctions between the normal and the pathological, good and bad deviations in the use of the mouth. Economists talk, along with historians, about the poetic geography of condiments, the travels of sugars and caviar, the saga of salt. Along the way, they extract a theory. From the mastery of the sphincter to the banknote, paper money to precious shellfish. Mythological meanderings. They just need a Lewis Carroll or a Lucian of Samosata. Sociologists like Bourdieu talk about working-class predilections (heavy, salty, fatty) and middle-class preferences. Gastronomers talk about flavours, colours and savours, sapidity and melting or tender characteristics. But theologians would talk of one of their seven capital sins.
Then the philosopher might suggest eradicating the sacred, and annihilating the impulses to renunciation and asceticism we have integrated so thoroughly. Dionysian wisdom will point out the impertinence of secular praise and the barrenness of bringing Christianity to account. Atheist knowledge is aesthetic wisdom. Confusing a science of action with an art of living calls for a dietet(h)ics along eudemonic lines. The flesh has no destiny but to exist prior to death, since afterwards it is destined to rot and to burst into myriad pieces. The misuse of the body is a failing that contains its own sanction – lost time cannot be regained.