Pléyade 36. Rhetorics of incorporation: food, dietetics and cannibalism in philosophy and social theories
Starting from the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, we open the question of food in philosophy by pointing out that its treatment is constituted as a tropic, which makes eating - as always an eating-something-other - a key figure of displacement or semantic transposition to refer obliquely to issues that are, in fact and in law, the most important for philosophical discourse[1]. Especially, we refer to life and served as the basis for the edition and movements proper to the soul or spirit: thought, intentionality, reflection, idealization and relationship, which have been described many times under the logic of assimilation, incorporation, even directly nutrition.The avenues of thought that open up from these problems include questions of ontology, epistemology and ethics, in effective interdisciplinary dialogue within the humanities and social sciences.
Contemporary exception, especially German idealism and the theses on the speculative subject-object relationship, within the framework of an analysis of the spiritual (Gestigkeit) that involves above all Kant and Hegel and, in a critical tone, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, among others; 2) contemporary philosophy in relation to psychoanalysis and its legacies, especially focused on the work of mourning, as introjection or incorporation of the lost object inside the ego, in addition to issues related to orality (K. Abraham, S. Ferenczi, N. Abraham, M. Törok, M. Klein, among others); 3. Klein, among others); 3) themes at the crossroads of cultural anthropology and food studies, especially referring to anthropophagy and cannibalism, taking into account the theoretical yield they enable (C. Lévi-Strauss, M. Harris, M. Mauss, M. Métraux, E. Viveiros de Castro, etc.); 4) aesthetic problems related to anthropofagia and cannibalism, taking into account the theoretical yield they enable (C. Lévi-Strauss, M. Harris, M. Mauss, M. Métraux, E. Viveiros de Castro, etc.). ); 4) aesthetic problems related to the sense of taste, in its wide use in the philosophy of art (Burke, Hume, Kant, Korsmeyer); 5) ethico-political questions ranging from antiquity to the present day, centered on the ideas of dietetics as the basis of an ethics of self-care and on the idea of commensality as the basis of community thought (Plato, Epicurus, Seneca, Augustine, Brillat-Savarin, Feherbach, Fourier, Nietzsche, Foucault, etc. ).
In this way, our interest is to show the possibility of an incorporative rhetoric as the basis of the speculative logic of the theoretical discourses of the humanities and social sciences, mediated by the use of the food metaphor -even cannibalistic- as a tool of speculation. Ultimately, the aim is to contribute to the development of theoretical matrices that allow critical interdisciplinary dialogues, and that effectively link the analysis of language with the themes of philosophy in its relation to life, both in its material-biological and cultural and technical dimensions.
In this context of research, the following monographic dossier is proposed: Rhetorics of incorporation: food, dietetics and cannibalism in philosophy and social theories.
Languages: English, Portuguese and Spanish.
Submissions until: March 31, 2025
Publication date: December 2025
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Guest editor
Valeria Campos Salvaterra, holds a PhD in Philosophy from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in co-direction with the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. She is a full time professor and researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. She is the author of the books: “Violence and Phenomenology. Derrida entre Husserl y Levinas” (Santiago: Metales pesados, 2017), ”Transacciones peligrosas. Economies of violence in J. Derrida” (Santiago: Pólvora, 2018), ”Comenzar por el terror. Essays on philosophy and violence” (Buenos Aires: Prometeo, 2020) and of numerous articles on the problem of violence in its relation to discourse in contemporary philosophy. Currently, he has expanded his field of study to the use of rhetorical figures associated with food in philosophy, which have allowed him to study epistemological, ontological and ethical problems from a new perspective. In this context, he has published the book “Pensar/comer. A philosophical approach to food” (Barcelona: Herder, 2023).
[1] The thesis of a constitutive metaphoricity of philosophical discourse was configured by Derrida in the 1970s, and described in terms of incorporation in contemporaries on Freud and psychoanalysis (1967, 1977, 1980), on Kant (1975 and 1982) and on Hegel (1974), but also with the later writings on Marx (1993) and, retrospectively, also with those early ones dedicated to Heidegger (1964, 1967) and Levinas (1967, and 1996), among others. This question is explicitly taken up again by Derrida at the end of the 1980s, in an unpublished seminar that is the current object of our research, given in the United States and France between 1989 and 1991: Manger l'autre: Politiques de l'amitié and Rhétoriques du cannibalisme. Both seminars are archived in the special collection of the library of the University of California Irvine (UCI) (http://hydra.humanities.uci.edu/derrida/uci.html), and are part of a series of courses given by Derrida in the longer period from 1983 to 1991, which served as the basis for the edition and publication of the text Poltiques de l'amitié in 1994.