In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16.4 (2002) 286-288



[Access article in PDF]
Carnal Appetites: Food Sex Identities. Elspeth Probyn. New York: Routledge, 2000. v + 168 pp. $19.99 paperback, 0-415-22305-9.

Kant, reflecting late in life on the pleasures of the table, praised "a good meal in good company" as "the kind of good living that seems to harmonize best with humanity" (Kant 1974, 144). Subsequent philosophers, influenced much more by the Critique of Pure Reason, have tended not to follow Kant in recognizing the table as a place of importance. There are recent signs of change as philosophers like Susan Bordo and Carolyn Korsmeyer consciously embrace reflection on food. Anthropologists have been at it longer, as evidenced by Claude Levy-Strauss, Sidney Mintz, and Mary Douglas. Elspeth Probyn's latest book comes at the subject from yet another perspective, that of "cultural studies." As such, the work does not privilege any particular academic discipline, does not distinguish sharply between popular and high culture, and seeks to be on the cutting edge of contemporary theorizing about existential concerns.

Carnal Appetites does draw on some specifically philosophical inspiration. Foucault's emphasis on ethics as "concern for the self" as opposed to "morality," where the main emphasis turns on "injunction and interdiction," is one such pivot (2000, 4). The concern for self marks out an important aim for the book: using the "materiality of eating, sex and bodies in order to draw out alternative ways of thinking about an ethics of existence, ways of living informed by both the rawness of a visceral engagement with the world, and a sense of restraint in the face of the excess" (3).

Another, and more central, philosophical pivot comes from Deleuze and Guattari: their notion of "rhizome." Root plants like the potato that send out a variety of shoots are rhizomatic. Metaphorically, this replaces the taproot model, which favored rigid unities. Probyn does not put it this way, but it appears that, from the rhizomatic perspective, Platonic Forms and the taproot are inverted versions of the same rejected image. [End Page 286] Both maintain a single manifestation as "real," or "essential," with all others being distortions. "Beyond the arboreal, tap-root logic of, say, the family tree, which ties me in lineage to my forefathers, the rhizome spreads laterally and horizontally. . ." (17). Rhizomes liberate by allowing us to open "seemingly closed structures, including those we call ourselves" (17).

Probyn's book has six chapters and a postscript: (1) Bodies that eat; (2) Feeding McWorld, eating ideologies; (3) Eating sex; (4) Cannibal hunger, restraint in excess; (5) Eating in black and white: the Making of Mod Oz (dealing with race issues in Probyn's homeland, Australia); (6) Eating disgust, feeding shame; (Postscript) Eating—the new sensuality? Chapters 5 and 6, the least influenced by cultural studies rhetoric, are the strongest. Chapter 5 provides a careful reading of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," while chapter 6 explores the treatment of Australian aboriginals via various feeding plans established for them by white authorities.

This book both builds on contemporary theorizing—for example feminist, gay, lesbian, and queer theory—and takes issue with trends within that theorizing. Specifically, the politics of identity is targeted as not being fluid enough. According to Probyn, it remains caught in a kind of essentialism that uses sex as the determinant of identity. "Could it be simply that food is now replacing sex as the ground of identities, be they gendered, national, post-colonial, collective or individual? If this is so, what happens to the purchase of all those theories—feminist, gay, lesbian, queer, psychoanalytic, etc.—that have privileged sex in one way or another as either constituting the very truth of ourselves; or those that have invested in endlessly deconstructing that supposed truth?" (69-70). Probyn also seeks to reduce the emphasis on ressentiment, which she finds prevalent in much contemporary theorizing: "In a situation where politics (be they queer, feminist, left- or right-wing) are increasingly structured by ressentiment and a hierarchy of injury, the question of food and eating provides another perspective" (7...

pdf