Eating the other Levinas’s ethical encounter Dr Angela Hirst www.thegoodsoup.blogspot.com My being-in-the-world or my ‘place in the sun’, my being at home, have these not also been the usurpation of spaces belonging to the other man whom I have already oppressed or starved, or driven out into a third world; are they not acts of repulsing, excluding, exiling, stripping, killing? (Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy,” 1989:82). We live from ‘good soup’… (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961:110). Contents (Pre)facing the story i Introducing avoidance, violence, and Levinas iii One Levinas separates the (hu)man from the non(hu)man, using hunger, enjoyment and anxiety to illuminate their relationship 1 1 A hungry stomach without ears 5 The world appears to me when I am alone and hungry 6 Fleeting enjoyment, or being hungry again 16 2 Eating sensibly and the anxiety of the il y a 23 Experiencing the contentment of sensibility 24 Experiencing the horror of the il y a 27 Returning to elevation (from a different perspective) 35 Two Levinas inadvertantly tells the story of technological food production and the invisible food-making work of women 39 3 Taming the stomach without ears 43 Men are called to take before consuming, to acquire and to store 45 Masculinisation of labour, unpalatability, and a brief history of animal slaughter 53 4 Making the raw into the cooked, or the invisible work of women 61 The feminine that is gentleness 62 The woman that is house 69 Remaking (the slippery tale of food) 77 Three Unravelling the roles that food, the elemental and my dwelling play in Levinas’s story about guilt and responsibility toward the other (hu)man 79 5 My ‘hunger’ for hunger 83 Desire and alterity 84 Guilt and the face 90 6 Giving bread from my mouth and then feeding the world 101 Feeding the other (hu)man 102 Putting my responsibility into context 105 Retelling (the story of Levinas in my life) 113 Encountering Manny 114 Four Avoiding Levinas’s concept of ethics and dealing with the consequences 117 7 Spatial avoidance in my city 121 Avoiding guilt in city space 122 8 Eating the Other to make life exciting again 131 Caging the wild Other 132 Resurfacing (or waiter, there’s alterity in my soup!) 139 Referencing 143 Acknowledging Sam for workshopping and mealmaking, my family for their love, Krista for her leonine editing, Mum for her proofreading, dako for his conversations, Greg and John for their architecture/philosophy advice, and Michelle, for your brilliance, wisdom and countless hours of work. Abbreviating Levinas’s works BI 1983. "Beyond Intentionality," in Philosophy in France Today. A. Montefiore (ed.). Translated by K. McLaughlin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 100-15. CH 1989. "As If Consenting to Horror." Translated by P. Wissing. Critical Inquiry. 15(Winter): 485-8. DEL 1986. Levinas, Emmanuel, and Richard Kearney. 1986. "Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas," in Face to Face with Levinas. R. Cohen (ed.). Translated by R. Kearney. Albany: SUNY Press: 13-33. DF 1963 (1990). Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by S. Hand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. EE 1947 (2001). Existence and Existents. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press. EFP 1989. "Ethics as First Philosophy," in The Levinas Reader. S. Hand (ed.). Translated by S. Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 75-87. EI 1982 (1985). Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillipe Nemo. Translated by R. A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. EP 1996. "Enigma and Phenomenon," in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. A. Peperzaak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 65-78. FOO 1998. "From the One to the Other: Transcendence and time," in Entre Nous. Translated by M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press: 133-53. GP 1987. "God and Philosophy," in Collected Philosophical Papers. A. Lingis (ed.). Translated by A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Nijhoff: 153-73. GW 1998. Of God Who Comes To Mind. Translated by B. Bergo. Stanford: Stanford University Press. HGU 1963 (1990). "Heidegger, Gagarin and Us," in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by S. Hand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press: 231-4. IT 1998. "The I and the Totality," in Entre Nous. Translated by M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press: 13-38. JF 1963 (1990). "Judaism and the Feminine," in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by S. Hand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. JFE 1969. "Judaism and the Feminine Element." Translated by E. Wyschogrod. Judaism. 18(1): 30-8. LP 1967 (1987). "Language and Proximity," in Collected Philosophical Papers. A. Lingis (ed.). Translated by A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martin Nijhoff: 109-26. NC 1998. "Nonintentional Consciousness," in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other. Translated by M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press: 123-32. ND 1963 (1990). "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights," in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by S. Hand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press: 151-3. OB 1974 (1998). Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence. Translated by A. Lingis. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. OF 1998. "Is Ontology Fundamental?," in Entre Nous. Translated by M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press: 1-11. OMB 1996. "On Maurice Blanchot," in Proper Names. Translated by M. Smith. Stanford: Stanford University Press: 127-70. PJL 1998. "Philosophy, Justice, and Love," in Entre Nous: Thinking of the Other. Translated by M. B. Smith and B. Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press: 103-21. PM 1988. Wright, Tamra, Peter Hughes, and Alison Ainley. 1988. "The Paradox of Morality: An interview with Emmanuel Levinas," in The Provocation of Levinas. R. Bernasconi and D. Wood (eds). Translated by T. Wright and A. Benjamin. London & New York: Routledge: 168-80. S 1963 (1990). "Signature," in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism. Translated by S. Hand. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press: 291-5. SH 1976 (1998). "Secularization and Hunger." Translated by B. Bergo. Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal. 20-21(2,1): 3-12. TAO 1989. "Time and the Other," in The Levinas Reader. S. Hand (ed.). Translated by R. A. Cohen. Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 37-58. TE 1978 (1998). "Transcendence and Evil," in Collected Philosophical Papers. Translated by A. Lingis. Dordrecht: Martin Nijhoff: 175-86. TH 1996. "Transcendence and Height," in Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings. A. Peperzaak, S. Critchley and R. Bernasconi (eds). Bloomington: Indiana University Press: 11-31. TI 1961 (2003). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Translated by A. Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. TO 1947 (1987). Time and the Other. Translated by R. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. TW 1949 (1989). "The Transcendence of Words," in The Levinas Reader. S. Hand (ed.). Translated by S. Hand. Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 144-9. i (Pre)facing the story This book is the story of my journey with Emmanuel Levinas on a dystopic path to the ethical encounter. For the journey, I agree to be Levinas’s human subject, to encounter his “other”. And he agrees to traverse a path through my world, a world of food and eating. To ready me for the encounter, Levinas tells me the story of his ethics, narratively (we ‘journey’ through it), and so my book is unavoidably ‘story’ too. To preface, then: The ethical encounter is a “face to face” encounter between a “human” subject (me) and an “other” (TI:39). In my encountering the other face to face in the world of food, food production and eating, Levinas tells the story of the violences of my existence—of my ‘eating’ of the world at the expense of the other. Face to face with the other, I cannot avoid my responsibility for the needs and suffering of the other. In “proximity” with the other, I am guilty for eating; in proximity, I respond by giving the other “bread from [my] mouth” (OB:100). In the first four chapters of the journey, I am hungry, and Levinas leads me through scenes replete with food and eating. Some of these scenes Levinas had intended to show me, and some he did not; some scenes I show him (I have, after all, asked him into my world). At first, he shows me how this world can satiate my needs, but how it will, inevitably and inextricably, leave me, a not-yet ethical human subject, vulnerable and exposed. So Levinas and I enter scenes that help me avoid exposure: Industrialised production and destruction of animals for food and its sequelae of familiar and dependable home-cooked meals, both temporally and temporarily, secure me from feeling anxious in the world. But, with security, my enjoyment loses its exciting edge. ii In chapters five and six, Levinas takes me to the space where the ethical encounter is meant to take place; and he has readied me through vivid story to feel guilty—I am ready now to give the bread from my mouth to the other. But there is no other here for me to encounter. I confront Levinas; I ask him to think beyond the security of his own ethical space. I suggest that perhaps the spatial strategies he has shown me to avoid the threats of the world have now all but voided that world itself—voided the possibility of my encountering (any) other(s). It is here that I leave Levinas, in the silence he offered me in reply, and I walk alone into the final two chapters. I argue (with whom, for there are no others?) that, perhaps, the world around me is a hyper-secured space that refuses to regard the boundaries that Levinas sets upon it.