You are what you eat: thinking food otherwise -- Georges Bataille's pornographic food -- Samuel Beckett's alimentary Cogito -- Food, the fall, and the detective: the case of Paul Auster -- Food in Margaret Atwood's Dystopias -- Modernism, postmodernism, and the otherwise of eating.

Angelaki, Volume 18, Issue 4, Page 63-79, December 2013.

This essay provides an overview of seminal examples of Western thought in which food features as a means to the conceptual differentiation of the human from the animal. Such an approach allows the emergence of a “structure” that seems to underlie the production of these distinctions. It is, paradoxically, human and animal mutuality – as this is manifested in their common need for, and consumption of, food – that has been utilised as their “differentiator” in the Western tradition and it (...) is this, I argue, that renders possible the functions of what Agamben calls the “anthropological machine.”. (shrink)