Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Uh huh. Uh
, hi. Thanks for coming. I want to
thank Tom for inviting me to do this. Uh
, I think, uh, Bruce and Laurie in
the library staff for setting this up, setting this
whole thing up. I should also say thanks to
my various colleagues and political science and aspect to read
through drafts of this as I was working on it
, and, uh, to the College of Liberal
Arts and Human Sciences as a unit who gave me
a grant a few years ago so I could finish
writing this. What I still think is a relatively
peculiar book that I started writing in 2005. Um
, back before food as a research topic really seemed
to take off. It was before Michael Pollen had
published The Omnivore's Dilemma. And before the words food
Studies started appearing on so many so much university letterhead
across the country. Uh, in 2000 and five
, I thought I was ahead of the curve.
I was telling people I was a political political theorist
writing about food. But you mark my words.
Everybody's gonna be talking about food in just a few
years. Uh, and everybody said. Sure they
will. But by the time the book came out
in 2013, I seemed like I was at best
in the middle of a very large pack of books
about food. Uh, and at worst I was
actually behind the curve. But no matter, because
I realized when I was finishing the book that I
wasn't really writing a book about food at all.
I was writing a book about politics, about the
vocabulary that people have for understanding politics in particular,
how the language of politics has been subsumed into that
of consumerism such that so many questions that we have
for so long thought of as in the domain of
politics, from questions of environmental protection to worker safety
are now supposedly addressed through our shopping habits. We
buy a Prius or heirloom tomatoes. We vote with
your dollar or vote with your fork. The shift
has not happened without notice. Of course, many
people have been talking about it. But one way
that people defend this shift is by noting a lack
of faith in the conventional arenas of political struggle.
I can certainly understand why the cynicism and corruption on
display and representative politics might send people fleeing to other
venues to try to affect change in the world.
Indeed, large sections of my book are spent explaining
why the contemporary disenchantment with politics makes all the sense
in the world. But I argue in the book
that the ideal of responsible consumerism, the idea that
we might respond to contemporary urgencies surrounding malnutrition, climate
change and economic inequality by shopping differently ultimately promotes classical
ideas about self reliance and self governance that themselves form
the philosophical foundations for pursuing, privatized and individualistic rather
than institutionalized and collective solutions to our problems. Responsible
consumerism, in other words, shifts the attention shifts
the location of politics, from the public sphere to
the private sphere, from the state to the market
. Far from a challenge to the forces that caused
so many to feel as though their life is beyond
their control. Such responses often contribute to them,
So the book looks at explosions and popular food discourse
, from top chef and the biggest loser to the
rise of farmers markets and the latest salmonella scares to
demonstrate how people today are both fascinated and frightened by
their food. This, of course, is not
new. people have been fascinated and frightened by their
food for a long, long time. People have
been talking and writing about food for just as about
as long as we've been eating, which is to
say forever. People have also been worrying about gluttony
, wait contamination and famine for centuries. Indeed,
one of the first recognized dangers of the rapidly expanding
capitalist markets of the 12th century was the unregulated sale
of rancid meets. And if you spend a few
years studying food as I just have, you quickly
realize that not only does every academic discipline from the
liberal arts and beyond have its own canon of food
writing, sociologists go to Jack Goody and Sidney Mintz
. Anthropologists go to Mary Douglas and Claude Levi Strauss
. Philosophers go to Aristotle and Peter Singer. You'll
also realise that everybody you want to talk to,
we want to tell you not about what they eat
, but about some book or movie or news item
that changed how they think about food. At a
certain point, you'll ask everybody to just stop talking
. My research stems from a curiosity about why food
is so fascinating and so frightening. Why does remain
so central to so many dimensions of human thought for
so long, we might assume that people are obsessed
with food because it's so important to our survival.
But when you think about the intensity of the attention
paid to food, the anxieties, the pleasures and
the memories attached to food, it's clear that we
don't devote nearly this much energy to pondering life's other
daily necessities. We sleep and we wear clothes every
day. But the attention paid to the sourcing of
our cotton, our beds in our housing, hardly
compares to the concerns expressed about pesticides and food,
miles and home cooked meals. I think one of
the reasons we pay so much attention to food is
that food is never just food. Discussions of food
refused to stay put. They move, they meander
, they migrate. They start in one place,
perhaps one academic discipline. But then quickly move someplace
else. Debates about organic food inevitably become debates about
state regulation, about intellectual property, about environmental science
. Start talking about vegetarianism, and soon you're asking
economic questions about industrial development as well as philosophical questions
about what it means to be a human being.
The literature on obesity bleeds into those of crop subsidies
, the nature of post industrial work and because the
decline in family meals are an issue. The cultural
politics of feminism. Indeed, food is an in
road to talking about just about anything you want to
talk about. Culture, environment, economics, history
, biology, in debates about food, cross other
borders as well, most notably when the products of
economic markets and distant locales find themselves in the most
intimate of private spaces. The family dinner table,
food compromises to quite cherished borders. The border between
here and there, or U S and Mexico,
for instance, and the border between the public and
the private. But most broadly and most crucially,
when we eat in the physical act of digestion,
and here is really where my project started. In
the physical act of digestion another, perhaps the most
cherished border is compromised, and we are forced to
confront the limits of ourselves when we eat something that
was not me, say an apple suddenly becomes me
. And then later, of course in the day
, something that was me at the other end of
the digestive tract is suddenly not me anymore, right
? Our bodies fuse with and we become momentarily indistinguishable
from the world that surrounds us Objects Objects that were
once part of the external world are literally incorporated into
the self, and the border between the self and
the world is demolished. This is why Michael Pollen
, the crown prince of local foods, opens the
Omnivore's dilemma by declaring quote, The way we eat
represents our most profound engagement with the natural world in
eating that the natural world actually becomes part of ourselves
. And it's crossing of this border, the border
that separates the self from the world that I think
renders food not just a precious resource but a crucial
element in allowing us to think about who and what
we are. We all know this, of course
. Isn't this what we mean when we So I'm
five minutes into my talk and I've just announced that
everybody knows everything. I've just said right, But
isn't this what we mean when we say you are
what you eat? Typically, we use this piece
of folk wisdom to link diet to health healthy food
, and you'll have a healthy body, a sentiment
attributable to 19th century food writers on some real server
in who first declared quote, Tell me what you
eat, and I will tell you what you are
. But it was another 19th century writer, a
philosopher named Ludwig Firebox, who gave the phrase It's
most lyrical and its most meaningful expression in German.
The words eat and are are homonyms. They're both
pronounced deceased. So the sentence you are, what
you eat in German is there. Mention East East
, which is actually trust me on this. Pretty
funny, all right, it's kind of a joke
. My argument doesn't depend on you actually thinking that's
funny. But nonetheless, I think it's funny before
your box point couldn't be more serious. And he
uses this phrase to emphasize that humans are not just
animals, but that we are matter in some important
ways, indistinguishable from all the matter that surrounds us
as we harvest energy and nutrients from the soil,
the proceeds of that labour are eventually absorbed right into
our bodies. When we eat, the external world
is internalized, and things that once confronted us as
part of the external world are suddenly part of our
body. One second, the apple is not me
. The next second, the apple is me my
body fuses with the world for a moment at least
. I can't distinguish myself from the world. The
world is me, and I am the world you
can see. I assume how this perspective might lead
. Firebox took care for the material world in a
way that today we might call Ecological the book,
and that's really for your box point. If you
see the world this way, you can't think about
yourself as some special being that stands apart from the
world. The book really aims to take this insight
seriously and looks at how the experience of food structures
are variability to conceptualize who and what we are.
The book takes a rather unconventional approach to making this
case by looking at metaphors and specifically, but not
exclusively by looking at digestive metaphors in the history of
political thought. So the book starts in the 17th
century, when the most influential political writers inaugurated started
a way of thinking about politics that ignored digestive processes
. Before the 17th century, the most common political
metaphor on the on the horizon was clearly the body
politic, a turn of phrase that characterized political society
as an organic being where each member is essentially connected
to all the others. In one classic formulation from
the 12th century here, quote the position of the
head and the republic is occupied by a prince.
The place of the heart is occupied by the Senate
. The judges and the governors are the ears and
the eyes and the workers of the limbs and this
sort of thing, right? And so the idea
behind this metaphor of a body politic is that all
the members of society were essentially dependent upon one another
and also essentially vulnerable to one another in the same
way. That would say, your arm is not
separate from your heart. These things are essentially linked
to one another, but quite rapidly almost overnight in
the middle of the sorry. In the middle of
the 17th century, people more or less stopped using
this metaphor of a body politic, and they started
instead describing society as a social contract. This legalistic
rather than organic metaphor conveyed that society was held together
by choice and law instead of by blood and guts
. And that's all. This is also, exactly
when I dropped the water, this is exactly the
period when we developed many of the protocols we still
use for concealing our digestion. This is when we
decided it was, and by this I mean it
was more or less overnight around the year 16 50
. This is when we decided it was crude to
burp at the table to spit out chewed food or
talk with your mouth full. This is when we
required people to keep private bathrooms and when we stopped
butchering animals in public. In short, bodily processes
were more or less removed from public view right in
the middle of the 17th century, just as people
came to represent and think of people as transcendent individuals
defined by their minds rather than their bodies sovereign over
themselves and clearly separated from their environment. I argue
in the book that because the process of digestion calls
this model of humanity into question political writers of the
day and I focused mostly on Thomas Hobbes and John
Locke, but also Rene Descartes, the political writers
of the day seemed to go out of their way
to avoid talking about digestion. Thomas Hobbes even wrote
an entire treatise about the body day corpora that never
once mentions the fact that Bodies digest now. By
contrast, political Thought took a turn for the bilious
in the 19th century. Marx famously calls Commerce social
metabolism, and it compares. The taking in of
energy is just the moving of value through an economy
. It's just like eating. Nietzsche famously describes memory
as indigestion. He calls it an inability to be
through with something right. You take something in and
you can't get rid of it. Uh, and
Hagel's entire philosophy is organized around the logic of digestion
. Numerous people have argued that I argue that this
is not just poetic innovation, but that the shift
in language reflects a different way of understanding what it
means to be a human being when it's more comfortable
with digestive activity because it's less predicated on a demand
to separate actors from their environments, the people that
Hagel marks in need to describe are essentially dependent on
their natural environments, and I label their contribution here
. The digestive turn in political theory, a turn
that presents humanity is more animal more vulnerable and more
receptive to the than the isolated individuals that we see
in those earlier writers. In a chapter on diet
turns through the 20th century. I show how the
moral imperative to control one's own weight direct stems directly
from the assumption of sovereign individuality that you see in
lock and that diet literature characterizes humans as entrepreneurs of
their own well being in a way that reinforces individualist
politics. Now much of the book is flushing out
how the world might look how the world in our
politics might look through a digestive lens on political thought
. Argue that many of the political impasse is that
we find ourselves in, could be alleviated by more
digestive approach to politics, argue that politics is essentially
organized around borders, and the sterile and bloodless metaphor
IX of 17th century political thought prime us to experience
these borders is under threat, a threat we experience
as anxiety. In the book, I focus on
three type of borders that I think are threatened in
this age of globalization borders between the self and the
world, that I just talked about borders between here
and there that are used to enforce territorial control and
the border between the human and the non human that
animates so many medical controversies today. Or, as
I put it in the book, The borders unfocused
on our borders of the self, the borders around
space and the borders around species. Sometimes the anxieties
around these borders as explicit as when local food advocates
attempt to build a political movement anchored in the centrality
of lived space. This retrieval of community assert reasserts
the privilege of physical geography just when so much life
is migrating into the placeless space of the Internet.
That is, I think it's no accident that we
see a privileging of the local, an emphasis on
locality and the return to shared space when technological innovation
is changing the very nature of space and what it
means to occupy a place. But sometimes it is
more metaphorical. Look closely at the debates about food
and you'll find the same vocabularies of borders, border
integrity, collapsing space and assimilation that you see,
uh, that you see in debates about globalization debates
about a so called epidemic of obesity, for instance
, evoked fears about contagion and infection that mirror debates
about immigration. It's one thing to note how the
dominant public health scares of recent years have been cast
as unwelcome immigrants from abroad. Bird flu and SARS
coming from Asia. Mad cow disease from Europe,
AIDS coming from Africa But casting obesity as an epidemic
quote unquote, which the centers centers for Disease Control
, has done consistently since the 19 nineties but never
did before the 19 nineties. This is significant because
, as opposed to these other conditions, obesity is
not a contagious disease. Obesity is not contagious,
and obesity doesn't meet any of the standard medical definitions
of what constitutes a disease. So somehow it's an
epidemic, even though it's not a contagious disease.
Alongside recognition that the highest rates of obesity in the
US remain among Native Americans and Mexicans in the American
Southwest, it starts to look like debates about obesity
are less about weight than they are about borders.
As another example, take the discourses of meat in
the most highly charged debates about eating meat. And
here I mean debates about eating animal flesh, vegetarianism
and debates about eating human flesh cannibalism. The real
stakes of these debates, and this is usually quite
explicit in both of the literatures. The stakes are
in attacking or defending the border that separates the human
from the non human. Vegetarians typically argue that the
line has been overdrawn that non human animals are not
so different from humans for us to justify using them
for food well, The near universal prohibition against cannibalism
seems anchored in a popular belief that humans are categorically
different from other animals. And so even when recently
departed human bodies confront us is readily available sources of
high quality protein, victims of auto accidents or heart
attacks. For instance, we all know that human
bodies are not food because there's something special about humans
. Vegetarians and cannibals, in other words, are
both arguing fundamentally about the meaning of the boundary between
the human and the non human. Is it a
coincidence that the rates of vegetarianism, roughly doubled in
popular culture, became saturated with vampires, zombies and
other quasi cannibals? Just as our culture and our
officials couldn't stop arguing about things like stem cells and
the right to die, that is, we couldn't
come to an agreement about when something starts being a
human and when something stops being a human. Such
examples abound, and I go through many of them
in the book. But I want to jump to
the end of the book because I think it's only
fair to warn you how the book ends, which
is not by reminding us to experience the pleasure of
good food, nor by asking us to shop and
eat more responsibly. Instead, it ends with return
to the old adage that compares laws to sausage.
These are things that you'd rather not see being made
. That is, the book really does end with
disgust and why so many of the products of digestion
and why so many of the products and processes of
digestion promote provoke so much. Discussed with guidance from
a surprisingly large and to my mind surprisingly fascinating body
of literature from philosophers and experimental psychologists about what people
find disgusting, I argue that discussed as a response
to substances that don't fit into our categories. So
I'm not alone when I suggest that bats are disgusting
when there are mammals with wings, because we all
know mammals don't have wings. Here's this mammal with
wings That's gross, right? Or that mucus is
disgusting because it's both liquid and solid, or neither
liquid nor solid, or that rotting food is disgusting
because it seems both alive and dead. We don't
talk with our mouths. We don't talk with our
mouths full because we do this because when we don't
talk with our mouths full because when we do this
we show our friends a substance, semi chewed food
that is in the process of becoming me. It
is both me and it is not me, and
so therefore it is gross and you don't want to
look at it. It's better not to see animal
flesh being ground into sausage, because the site reminds
us that we are simultaneously rational humans and bloodthirsty,
mortal animals. We are both human and non human
. Yuck, right? So I'm happy to talk
more about disgusting substances if you want. But the
point I want to make in the book is that
politics is politics. Itself is in many ways,
disgusting. The point of a democratic politics is that
people encounter different ideas, different kinds of people,
different kinds of practices, ideas, people and practices
that challenge what we think we know about ourselves and
our world. The essence of a democratic society is
that we experience the limit of our the limits of
ourselves. This is what democracy this is, what
democracy acts asks of us, that we experience difference
and that we entertain it. We host it,
we allow it the opportunity to become part of us
. Nobody wants to see somebody else do this.
Maybe nobody wants to see ourselves doing it. It's
usually not pretty like slaughtering animals. It might be
easier to just let the professionals do it behind closed
doors. But maybe being disgusted is the price we
pay for living in a democracy. So Bon appetit
. Nice. And I understand that I'm here to
take questions now. Right. Um so, unfortunately
, I've been asked to repeat all the questions for
the microphone here. So, uh, what?
What he asked. And so I'm gonna kind of
make my way through the question in my own way
, if you don't mind. What he asked about
was primarily this notion of this new, this new
rhetoric of a microbiome. This idea that are the
human body is made up of so much bacteria and
non human material. Um, that that's exactly what
it means to be a human being is being called
into question. And 111 version of this that I
talked about a lot in the book is the research
of Donna Haraway. She's become quite notable in her
past two or three books. I think she's gone
out of her way to note that I think her
figure is less than 10% of the cells in the
human body actually contain human D N A. Right
. So we're like 90% non human. And Donna
Haraway is this. There's a notable figure in kind
of post human political thought, asking us to rethink
what it means to be human being. So she's
very interested in human animal relations. Um, and
she has some very curious and circuitous things to say
about food. Um, in, uh, in
these passages when she's talking about this, she's not
really interested in talking much about food. But she
is interested in talking about a kind of arrogance of
presuming human support, superiority over nature that justifies so
many, um, harmful environmental projects as well as
particular ways of cultivating resources for food. Um,
one of the curious things the way it fleshes out
and Donna Haraway that I find very interesting is once
she starts unpacking the argument this way and saying that
human beings are 90% non human, that's overstating how
she puts it but that's the idea. Um,
she really does kind of lose traction on any ability
to say we ought not be cannibals. Right?
And she doesn't want to talk specifically about cannibals.
She does have some rather disgusting passages in her book
when she talks about eating various substances, Um,
that I maybe won't go into here, but she
you can kind of see the manuscripts struggling to,
uh, say don't get me wrong. I don't
want to say cannibalism is okay. Um, and
and the manuscript, her manuscript seems to struggle to
avoid saying that because I think she doesn't have.
She starts to realize that she's losing grounds for that
. So the way that plays out in my book
, I talk about these these kind of post human
researchers that are talking about this microbiome and talking about
how their project aligns with or veers from conventional political
projects in particular political projects anchored in the notion of
humanism. Kind of universal human rights, uh,
universal suffrage and all this sort of thing. Um
, that seems anchored in a belief that there is
a kind of creature in the world that is sovereign
over itself and has the power of rationality and speech
that can participate in electoral politics and the way in
jockeying for power in the way we all know.
Um and my fear is a lot of this literature
says we can kind of attack this notion of humanism
, develop this kind of post human philosophy and kind
of anchor it too Familiar emancipatory Democratic political projects.
Um, my worry is, once you start breaking
down the human and saying We're going to do this
post human project, you also are undercutting the kind
of philosophical principles of sovereignty and rationality that continue to
animate these ideas about democracy, for instance. So
it kind of, to put it perhaps in too
much technical terms and and overly pitifully at the same
time. I don't know how you can have democracy
if you don't believe in a demos, a kind
of of the people. And so that's kind of
where the book ends. There's a kind of impasse
. I argue in post human political thought that,
uh, in developing a kind of post human approach
to democracy, you simultaneously sacrifice a lot of the
philosophical justifications for believing in democracy to begin with,
um, and so I see the literature. Really
? In kind of a crisis there, I may
or may not have gotten there. You're suggesting that's
the position I'm taking. Okay, so, uh
, let me for the microphone. Uh, if
I understand the question, uh, it is,
um and, uh, I think it's a nicely
formulated question, and and the book does kind of
end with that question, right? The book before
the discussion chapter, I should say, uh,
it's about how we can continue to talk about democracy
in a way that is attentive to non the value
of non human creatures like nature and animals. Uh
, the argument I make is that that would be
great. That would be fantastic. But I don't
find a really convincing argument or vocabulary for it right
now, right? So people like Jane Bennet and
Bruno Latour are talking about ascribing the political virtues of
, like, agency or or you know, uh
, humanist kind of value to non human objects and
animals. Um uh, it's just not clear to
me how that works. I think that's a great
idea. But again, everything we know about how
politics works and and later is kind of open about
this is anchored in, if nothing else, a
belief in the power of speech. Write a belief
in the power of rationality and language to articulate things
what it means to give a tree political agency.
I just Nobody's really come up in my reading with
a coherent picture about what that actually means. I
think it's a good idea, but I think we
lack the vocabulary for making it actually, um,
coherent. Which is not to say it's an incoherent
idea. It's to say that we haven't figured out
how to do it yet. And so that's again
. That's where the chapter on animals ends, that
this is why vegetarian literature, I suggest in the
book. This is why vegetarian literature so easily becomes
a question about vegetarian dietary choice, right that even
Peter Singer and and Jacques Derrida, people who write
about the way we treat animals as a I mean
the term they like to use as genocide, right
? They're very open about using the word genocide.
What we have is a genocide of animals. Uh
, still there, solutions end up being don't eat
meat, right? As a kind of. So
because we lack this, uh, political vocabulary for
non human objects and animals. But we have We
have an ethical language for it. So these political
claims about genocide end up becoming ethical charges that are
kind of more graspable. Conceptually, I think No
. So the question is what the metaphors seem to
hide. Um, I'm, uh I admit,
when I when I started writing this book, I
think that was exactly the question I was trying to
answer. Um, as I was writing, I
stepped more away from this notion of hiding. Uh
, and rather than seeing the metaphors, this kind
of subterfuge for a deeper problem that we didn't want
to address, seeing the metaphors as kind of vehicles
, um, that travel when they resonate, if
you will. So I have a chapter, for
instance, on dietary trends in the 20th century and
the different ways people talked about how bodies gain weight
and how bodies can lose weight the different ways people
talked about it in the 20th century. And I
look at the metaphors and the and the vocabulary is
used to explain how to lose weight from 1900 to
2002. Really, uh, and identified three basic
periods. There's a kind of metabolic period before the
Great Depression. If you wanted to lose weight,
all the dietary literature said you need to speed up
your metabolism, get moving. Um, and this
you know, this idea of a human body as
a machine, right? If you want the if
you want the machine to burn fuel more quickly,
turn up the volume. I don't know what metaphor
speed. That's the word. The speed right.
And so this approach to understanding human bodies lays very
cleanly on the demands of an industrial economy after World
War Two, after the Great Depression, I should
say, um, people really stop talking about metabolism
when they in weight loss manuals and what they talked
about was desire hunger, appetite. Right? And
if you want to lose weight, you don't have
to get your metabolism going faster. You have to
stifle your hunger or trick your body into thinking it's
full, even though it's not right. And that
seems to map pretty well on. You know this
. This concern with desire and hunger maps pretty well
on the changing nature of the American economy, from
a industrial to a service economy after 2002, As
we all know, nobody tells you you need to
check your appetite or boost your metabolism. If you
want to lose weight, What you need to do
is cut out your carbs, right, Um,
and and the logic of carbs is very interesting.
Carbohydrates are the hormone that tell your body to convert
blood sugar into fat, right? So the logic
of the Atkins diet in the zone diet and all
these other diets that are focused on on carbs are
that you can take in all the food you want
, as long as your body doesn't get the message
that the food should be stored. In other words
, the way to lose weight after 2002, according
to this hormonal paradigm I call it, is,
um, to control the message is that your body
receives from the brain, right? And so this
, I say, is very much a kind of
the diet of the information economy. Just like you
can get rich by controlling information. Now, you
can get thin by controlling information. It's very curious
that hormonal diets or or low carb diets there's.
There's rampant evidence of people promoting low carb diets in
the 18 sixties, the 18 nineties, the 19
twenties, the 19 thirties um Robert Atkins wrote his
new diet revolution in 1972 and all these medical professionals
said, Don't buy it. It's dangerous and nobody
bought it. He issued the second edition in 1992
and all the doctors said, Don't buy it and
nobody bought it. And then suddenly, in 2000
and two, it's the top selling diet manual in
the world. It seems to me that rather than
hiding anything, the metaphors work. The kind of
informational approach to diet works when people are thinking and
an informational vocabulary. So, in other words,
the metaphor is not necessarily hiding anything. The metaphor
takes it achieves traction or resonance when it when it
corresponds to what's going on in the world. So
in other words, the metaphors don't hide so much
as they amplify. Right, Right, so,
so fantastic. So this actually. So the question
was about the crisis. We're now in the metaphors
we have for politics now, uh, the third
leg of the argument regarding political metaphors. We'll go
back to next question, right? I talked about
this metaphor of a body politic, which is his
organic metaphor that conveyed hierarchy, independence and vulnerability,
moving into a social contract metaphor that conveyed egalitarianism and
consent and reciprocity. People don't like to talk about
social contract so much anymore. What we see in
the literature is this notion of a social network.
Um, the argument I'm trying to make that resonates
with the previous question. Is a network unlike a
contract or a body, doesn't have any identifiable political
logic behind it? Right again, the body politic
is clearly hierarchical and predicated on dependence. The network
or the contract is clearly egalitarian and predicated on consent
. The network, you know, seems to be
dispersed and non hierarchical, but certainly can't account for
the continued existence of institutions of power like states and
corporations. And so it's a it's a it's a
It's a political metaphor that doesn't give people any place
to stand, to understand how they might act politically
. And so as a political metaphor as, ironically
, the metaphor that defines our politics. It's a
metaphor that itself doesn't have a politics that we can
hang on to, so that, I argue,
is the crisis. We're in very nicely leading question
. Thank you. Maybe I have more of the
book under myself. Maybe you have read it one
more. Uh, if it's one that you have
to repeat an elected or the 44th president, Uh
, I've read parts of your work before and somebody
that's, uh, you need to reread. You
guys can have a reading group as I'm trying to
work on the paper chapter from my next work on
the beheading and discussed, um and so you and
your book by returning to disgust and I want to
ask you something along the following eyes, it seems
to me that there's really two main moves of two
main arguments to main payout that I can come as
a result of your book. Want us to do
with, um, the digestive turn of the digestive
return? Its contributions to, um, the different
sense of thinking overthinking democracy, uh, democratic quality
. The other level, it seems to me,
has more to do with something which, and that's
going to lead to my question or even critique doesn't
really need to have anything to do with democracy.
And that has to do with something. And the
point about disgust, I think, brings that to
the floor and has to do with what? With
the help of people like Covina, Leo Butler will
be attempting to refer to as a critique of the
metaphysics of substance the non differential ability between the human
, which is something that again in the Treasury,
beheadings and suicide bombing and then comes back to the
fourth one as well. The thing that's telling to
me when I read was kind of your book,
but also, for example, Ben, it'll lead
to some of the tools running is that that doesn't
have to be a connection between a critique of the
metaphysics of substance and the drive back to rethink democracy
. So why do you fight compelling once you arrive
at that point of critiques to the notion of his
Gaza mobilized to bring him back into something that can
make a contribution to rethinking Latinos? And because I
can see that to some extent as a sort of
like a last ditch effort of trying to resurrect something
. And we kind of like a presence for the
human, you know, Democratic context. We thought
differently, even though we have already criticized the metaphysics
and substance about what I'm getting at I did until
the very end in terms of the proposal. And
I'm not going to be able to repeat that question
for the microphone. No, but in terms of
the end, the proposal that it's possible to retrieve
a kind of respect for the human exactly for something
that would still have a place for the isn't that
way to try to bring back, in a way
, the metaphysics of substance to the back door.
Yeah, I think so. And I think that's
, uh, somewhat unavoidable right, which is which
is more or less again, where the book ends
And that kind of indeterminate space, right that these
attempts to, uh, get beyond the human,
um, are giving up a lot of political resources
and they but they a lot of them disingenuously claimed
to be able to hang on to those resources.
And so the argument I make is that this is
why so much of this literature seems so uncompelling at
the end of it. And don't be uncompelling like
an interesting but like unpersuasive at the end of the
day that they can't close the deal because there's some
sleight of hand here and continuing to mobilize these conventional
political resources, even though the earlier parts of the
project really trouble the ability to hang on to those
resources. And so the argument I make in the
book is either we need to work on this and
come up with a new philosophical grounding for these political
resources that is compelling, or people doing this kind
of work are going to lose, they're going to
. It's probably the wrong word. Lose are going
to fail to articulate a coherent political program that people
can get behind right. And so again, the
argument to make at the end of the book.
This is why a lot of this theory ends up
being ethical theory instead of political theory, because you
can still talk about ethics from this position, but
it becomes harder and harder to talk about politics.
Um, and I'm interested in talking about politics,
and I'm not trying to claim that I know how
to do it after I've read Donna Haraway, but
that I recognize that Donna Harrow is attempt to continue
doing it, um, doesn't persuade me, and
so more work needs to be done there, or
we could just give up on these political values and
just try to create a universally ethical regime. Which
is, which is kind of how I think heroin
ends her books, right with the kind of she
calls it the never settled bio politics of inter tangled
species. Right. So the idea of the way
humans should relate to animals is every day and every
moment they should agonize over how they are treating animals
. And let's give up on this idea of creating
institutional protections for animals. That's the wrong route again
. I've overstated her case slightly, but not fundamentally
. I don't think Are you? I'm not persuaded
by that route or I'm not satisfied by it.
Um, thank you all for coming. And thank
you, Eric. Thank you very much. Thank 746 00:37:46.550 --> A:middle L:90% you.