VI

Derrida On Eating
For a “gastronomy to-come”

As soon as writing gets hold of it, the concept’s

goose is cooked
J. Derrida

Appetizer

As has often been revealed, even in the pages of this review1, a large part of western
philosophical tradition entertains a complicated relationship with the question of food and
gastronomical pleasure; a relationship that, to generalize (exceptions surely exist), can certainly be
defined as negative. Also common observation that the conviviality of the symposium and the
various social meanings of wine bear great importance in ancient culture seems not to hit the mark,
if what is in question is not so much the physical or psychic space—material or mental tabula—in
which or from which dialogues and even ideas grow, but rather the eventual true cognitive value of
food and of the gustatory experience.
From Plato onward, the prevalent epistemological paradigm excludes food and its perceptual
correlates—taste and smell—from the constructive horizon of philosophy. Philosophy has found
many reasons for this exclusion: if finality of philosophical life is knowledge as the search for truth,
and if the search for truth seems to require necessity, universality and separation from empirical and
material contingencies, the body and in particular its explicitly material functions would present an
obstacle. Since food is the most cumbersome of material objects and is in daily relation with our
body—though it is a necessary relation, as Feuerbach observed—its removal from the body of
philosophy and of the philosopher appears to be the least we can expect to happen. According to
Plato, philosophical life, insofar as life dedicated to the search for truth, must put necessity aside
and orient itself towards the most pure of desires; among these necessities eating and drinking are
targeted first, in view of their tendential reduction to the quantitative minimum and to qualitative
indifference. This exclusion has a primarily epistemological, but also biographical and existential,
importance, and it derives from reasons which have been rightly identified firstly through the
question of the hierarchy of the senses. The point is that even once we admit that we cannot know if
not through the senses and even within the senses, the most important tradition of western thinking,
both ancient and modern—typified by names like Plato, Aristotle, Kant and Hegel—makes the
distinction between cognitive and non-cognitive senses, between “high” senses and “low” senses.
Food is tasted, and in order for it to be tasted it must be introjected. A clash from which derives the
marginalization of the taste-olfactory system and its subordination relative to sight and hearing,
senses of distance that, as such, would permit objectivity and “true” knowledge, unlike taste and
smell, which are proximal and contact senses and thus whose very possibility of objectivity would
be compromised.
I will not enter into the merit of such questions that have been dealt with diffusely by numerous
authors2. I am interested, rather, in noting here that the configuration of the relationship between
philosophy and food, gastronomy and taste plays an important role even in regards to specific
positions of philosophers: as hypertrophic in the mind as they are moderate and thin in body, they
are almost always suspicious or even bothered when confronted with alimental pleasures. Pure
hedonism, provided something of the like exists, rather than a philosophical current, appears to
express a resistence to systematized wills of thought, a residual space akin to philosophy. But the
general tendency of philosophers when confronted with food is clear, even when their philosophies
express ideas that should move in the opposite direction. For example, the alimental aptitudes of a
philosopher like Wittgenstein, whose thinking never ceases to teach us strategies for surpassing the
rigid dichotomies of metaphysics and essentialism, have become almost proverbial: the same things
always cooked in the same manner and no concession to inventiveness or imagination. Omelette,
cheese, freeze dried eggs, polenta, boiled vegetables. Noteworthy are the anecdotes that describe
Wittgenstein’s reproaches towards his friends when, as a guest, he would find dishes which he
retained more elaborate and “snobby”3. Even Derrida, the philosopher of marginality and
differences, of the insurpassability of the biographical and of the biological, of materiality and of
the de-heirarchization of knowledge—in sum, the one who theorized the importance of everything
retained “unessential” and “merely empirical” by the traditional scheme—conducted a sober and
moderate alimental style, although not as ascetic as that of Wittgenstein. It is upon Derrida that I
will concentrate my reflections, in the hopes of showing how, despite an apparent disinterest, the
French philosopher proposes an implicit philosophy of the gastronomical, rich in interesting
implications. First and foremost, implications regarding metabolism and assimilation, digestion and
repulsion of all things philosophical as such, by all things gastronomical: it is for this reason that the

2
title speaks of the question of food for Derrida but also, at the same time, of Derrida’s food and of
Derrida as food.

First Entry (Derrida, The Animal)

On the plate, to begin, is a very Derridian question. A question that Derrida had never raised
explicitely but that seems to flourish naturally from his garden. An old and new question, that refers
to the beginnings and to the final outcomes of his reflection and that intersects two extreme textual
focuses of his philosophical path: the first is Economimesis, a work on aesthetics from 1975 that
directly tackles the question of taste through an ample reading of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, to
which Derrida dedicated the university seminar of 1973/4. The second text is The Animal That
Therefore I Am, released posthumously in 2006.
Here is the question, raw and without seasoning (it may also be a matter of the raw/cooked
relationship and of seasonings): do animals have taste?
This is a rigorously Derridian question because it intersects the two extremities of his reflection.
From its beginnings, in fact, deconstruction has questioned the confines and the limits of humans,
and, from the start, the question has covered the entire realm of food and of eating. Even earlier in
Economimesis, Derrida confronts the question of “eating the other” in Glas, a work on Hegel from
1974, where the problem is presented with clarity: to understand means to incorporate—that is to
eat, to absorb and to digest. This is the metaphorical notion of eating, the sensible origin of abstract
concepts; in this case the concept of “understanding”. The Hegelian system exemplifies this topic to
the highest degree, combining it with an infinite metabolism: both a structural cannibalism and an
unnecessary urge to be avoided, as we shall see. Within the context of such explicit metaphors of
eating Derrida dwells also upon the Hegelian distinction between animal and man. According to
Hegel’s well-known analysis, animals have a purely negative relation with objects, simply
swallowing them, whilst man, rather than devouring them, incorporates them in the abstract; from
this distinction arises subjectivity as such, man as spiritual being.
If the nexus between the question of introjection and the influences of psychoanalysis on the
thinking of Derrida have ever been analyzed, the gastronomical question has never been ploughed
through, for the simple reason that the latter is never considered as such, but only as a symptom and
product of fields thought to be basic. And yet, eating, understood metaphorically, mirrors a similar
distinction in actual eating. What emerges is the question of taste. Let us consider Brillat-Savarin:

3
“Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men know the art of eating”4; “the real
enjoyment of eating is a special prerogative of man”5, “Man [is] the great gourmand of nature”6. We
are in the middle of the second meditation of the treatise, in a paragraph entitled “The Supremacy of
Man”. Here Brillat-Savarin introduces a gustatory anthropocentrism, and retorting a few recent
doctrines according to which there are animals with more developed and more perfect gustatory
systems than those of human beings, he reasserts that “Animals are limited in their tastes [while]
man, on the other hand, is omnivorous; everything edible is prey to his vast hunger, and this brings
out, as its immediate result, tasting powers proportionate to the general use which he must make of
them”.7
Within the chain of the numerous oppositions that mark the ontological difference between
human beings and animals—hand/organ, smile/sadness, face/expression, logos/a-logos, etc.—
oppositions deconstructed by Derrida in many instances in his work, more metaphorical via Hegel
should be automatically and explicitely added, but also, indirectly, in its physical, “literal” meaning
(Derrida taught how the opposition between metaphorical and literal, between spiritual and physical
derived) the opposition between taste and “simple” nutrition. This opposition, which is also a
hierarchy, also marks the ideology of gastronomy as good taste, as understood in its current
meaning: quite another thing from nutrition, an area of liberty and pleasure entirely separated from
necessity and need. A good taste connected to a certain idea of “good”. Brillat-Savarin, lingering
upon the omnivorous nature of man, emphasizes the exemption from choices and responsibilities of
ethical nature: given that man can (biologically speaking) eat everything, he will be able to
(ethically speaking) eat everything, making use of this totality to his liking. I expect that it is for this
reason that Derrida apparently dismisses the gastronomical discourse: it is human taste—perhaps
too human—of bourgeois ideology promoted by Brillat-Savarin that must be deconstructed for an
alternative philosophical perspective.

Second Entry (Derrida, The Fine Taster)

The reading proposed by Derrida in the mid 1970s on the aesthetics of Kant revisits the
difference between man and animal through taste, and this time not only ideal taste. In
Economimesis the Kantian notion of “pure” taste is in question: free, universal, disinterested taste

4
without the aim of aesthetic judgement. According to Kant, animals do not feel “true” delight (Lust)
that is provoked by art but only pleasure (Genuss). Kant maintains that there are certain “arts”
whose purpose is pleasure: the art of conversation, chatting around a table, music during meals
and—we might add—cooking, a practice to which the German philosopher dedicated himself in
private. His meals are famous, planned to the last detail, and conceived for maximum convivial
delight. From an epistemological point of view, though, there is no concession to taste, because the
“true” arts have an internal aim that transcends the empirical sensibility of the moment, needs and
contingent necessities. The deconstruction of Kantian taste, whose ideality no longer entertains a
relationship with the physical taste of the palate, in this work rotates around the mouth; more
precisely, around what Derrida calls exemplorality. In this notion, which is also the title of the
second and final chapter of Economimesis, the entryway to stripping pure taste appears; and I mean
(using a metaphor whose pertinence will later be revealed) to cook it, returning it to its rawness.
The mouth is, in fact, the center of the analogy that governs the relationships between art, imitation
and production. It governs the hierarchical relationships between “Fine Arts” and pleasure and,
therefore, also between humanity and animality. And the mouth is the center of the analogy above
all becuase it indicates, concurrently, the physical and the metaphorical, body and spirit. The mouth
is a vital breath, pneuma, pnoè, love, logos, chewing, shredding, introjection, but also expulsion.
The mouth is simultaneously a place of ideality and of sensibility. In the Kantian cancellation of the
sensibile aspect of the mouth in favor of the spiritual one, Derrida catches sight of a process of
internalization and sublimation that substitutes the physical, the taste of the palate, with the ideal:

There is something like a movement of interiorizing suppliance, a sort of slurping by which, cut off from what we
seek outside, from a purpose suspended outside, we seek and give within, in an autonomous fashion, not by licking our
chops, or smacking our lips or whetting our palate, but rather (what is not entirely something else) by giving ourselves
orders, categorical imperatives, by chatting with ourselves through universal schemas once they no longer come from
the ouside. 8

The expression “licking one’s lips” translates into French as “se lecher les babines” which, as
the author so opportunely points out, means “to lick one’s chops”. Here’s what. In deconstructing
the pure ideality of taste, we encounter gastronomical taste. This deconstruction attacks, naturally,
the hierarchy of the senses, and it is here that Derrida introduces the topic of exemplorality as he
describes a passage in Critique of Judgement:

We judge to be coarse and ignoble the ‘mental attitude’ of those who have no feeling for beautiful nature and who
‘confine themselves to eating and drinking—to the mere enjoyments of sense’(§ 42).. In the first exemplorality, in the

5
exemplary orality, it is a question of singing and hearing, of unconsummated voice or ideal consummation, of a
heightened or interiorized sensibility; in the second case that of a consuming orality which as such, as an interested
taste or as actual tasting, can have nothing to do with pure taste. What is already announced here is a certain allergy in
the mouth, between pure taste and degustation. We still have before us the question of where to inscribe disgust. Would
not disgust, by turning itself back against actual tasting, also be the origin of pure taste, in the wake of a sort of
catastrophe?9

By abolishing the hierarchy of the senses, true degustation makes its entrance. And so, we travel
along a gastronomical thought in Derrida that however, as we have seen, with the same gesture
must move physical taste away from its “omnivorouse” and voracious, “encompassing” and
metabolizing valence. Physical taste must be cooked in order to bring it back to its rawness.
Against every humanistic anthropocentrism. Kant’s “pure” taste is a metaphysical taste—and here
is the supplement of deconstruction that moves Derrida’s thought away from the traditional,
bourgeois gastronomy à la Brillat-Savarin—but even the tase of the palate, physical taste, risks
being metaphysical.
Disgust, expressed through vomit, is what appears to be the most appropriate “conceptual”
instrument for cooking this concept of taste. Deconstruction is clarified here as respect for the
unassimilable, as a practice of precaution towards the indigestible, unmetabolizable alterity. Here,
deconstruction is clarified as a defense strategy of each difference. A remainder that escapes taste as
assimilation and total digestion. It is an irreducible heterogeneity “which cannot be eaten either
sensibly or ideally”: vomit (Eckel) 10. Vomit is not negative taste, like a negative delight; vomit is
the “product” of what is disgusting as that which provokes the desire to vomit. Economimesis
concludes by turning to what is disgusting, in the physical sense, and chemical, literally, from
which the analogy of the “spiritual” disgusting is launched.

First Course (Derrida, the Flexitarian)

If the initial question was “can animals taste?” these first reflections have led us to regard
deconstruction under a singular light: animals, in some ways, can taste, because taste is not simply
what we thought it was. And now, the time has come to bring the vegetarian question to the table,
seeing as this entire issue is a matter of animals, of ethics and of hospitality, in order to show that
deconstruction is flexitarian. In fact, on one hand Derrida claims, in compliance with his
characteristic gesture, the impossibility of being totally vegetarian; he had already declared the
comparison with Hegel, but this is confirmed, from different angles, in many other instances in his

6
work. One cannot not be (metaphorically) a carnivore, because eating the other cannot be avoided
absolutely, in primis because the same conceptualization is assimilation of the other to himself, a
digestive and metabolic process that reduces, incorporates and consumes. Culture and cultivation,
Derrida reminds us, have the same root: colere, to cultivate, to live, to celebrate but also to colonize.
From this very point of view a certain carno-fallo-logocentrism is inescapable. But, on the other
hand and at the same time, deconstruction fights always and anyhow in defense of the weakest, for
the rebalancing of the hierarchies—and so for animals and for all of the positions that, historically,
have defended the point of view of the flesh of the other, even on the level of “actual”, and not
metaphorical, alimentation. Deconstruction is, therefore, flexitarian, in the name of overtaking
anthropocentrism and subjectivity.
Another book from 1989 entitled “Il faut bien manger“, “Eating Well”, a
conversation/interview with Jean-Luc Nancy returns to the subject of eating, still in reference to the
notion of the subject. Through an analysis of a few of the authors whom he references—Hegel,
Nietzsche, Freud, Lacan, Lévinas and, above all, Heidegger—Derrida operates a deconstruction of
the idea of subject that does not amount to one of his destructions, but rather to a dislocated
redefinition on new foundations. The problem insists again upon the relationships between humans
and non-humans: it is not a matter of denying the differences between man and animal, it is a matter
of disarticulating them in another manner. All of this, the philosopher retains, does not mean
11
“defending vegetarianism, environmentalism or animal protection societies”. It means, rather,
recalling the question of the sacrifice of the animal in philosophical discourse and in the cultures in
which this is expressed, yet again, metaphorically just as it is literally. Here the sacrifice is “a non-
criminal death sentence”, through

ingestion, incorporation or introjection of the cadaver. It is a real, but also symbolic, operation when the cadaver is
an ‘animal’ (who will believe that our cultures are carnivorous because animal proteins are irreplaceable?), and a
symbolic operation when the cadaver is ‘human’ 12.

The possibility of a new idea of a potential “subject” happens through the deconstruction of
logocentrism as carno-fallogocentrism: the question of presence is (also) a question of meat, in a
metaphorical sense and in an actual sense. Derrida states this explicitely: I would like to prove one
day that this scheme implicates carnivorous virility” 13. Through a direct example, Derrida reasserts
with clarity that a redefinition of “subject” comes from the matter of taste: to whomever insists that
there exist women “subjects” or vegetarian subjects, it should be retorted that the very concept of
subject—as the very concept of philosophy—is masculine. Authority and autonomy, in the
carnivore scheme, are accorded to the male more than they are to the female, to the female more

7
than to animals, and to human adults more than to children: the virile man dominates nature
(vegetable and animal), sacrifices and eats meat. And so the question of taste touches upon the topic
of what is feminine with a thought whose difference is not able to be placed within a hierarchical
system. Here is an explosive example: in our cultures,

who could become chief of State, and accede to ‘the head’, by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring
himself a vegetarian? The head must eat meat (in view of himself being ‘symbolically’ eaten). Not to mention celibacy,
homosexuality, and even femininity14.

In a film on Derrida realized in 2002 by Kirby Dick and Amy Kofman, to which we will return,
the issue is declared in the following terms: there cannot exist a philosophical mother, only a
philosophical father15. Philosophy is a father, and deconstruction is the attempt to let the mother
play, giving her a voice, or better yet writing, at the margins of philosophy. When it is a question of
mothers, of women, it is also a matter of food and cooking: the hierarchy that subjects the
subjective senses to the objective senses is the same hierarchy that subjects cooking and gastronomy
to science and to art, and that subjects the female, who is in the kitchen, to the male who eats and
who thinks: it is not by chance that the philosophy of food was developed especially from questions
of gender and sexual difference thanks to the contributions of Deane Curtin, Lisa Heldke, Carolin
Korsmeyer, Elizabeth Telfer, etc.
In the final part of the interview with Nancy, Derrida insists: the structure of morale, of law and of
politics—even in what organizes them and supervises them, and that assumes the name
“sovereignty”—are all founded upon the sacrifice of animals; that is to say, on the metonymy of
“eating well” (bien manger)16. Deconstruction is not much an interrogation on eating or not eating
this or that, rather on rethinking man (metaphorically) and animal (actually). It is not an
interrogation of the absolute qualitative difference, as much as it is of quantity and modality: “given
that we must eat” (il faut bien manger), and that “this is good and proper, and that there is no other
definition of good”, then: “how must we bien manger?” 17 (I have left the idiomatic expression in
French in order not to lose one of the meanings at stake: we must eat/we must eat the good/we must
eat well). We must eat well in the sense of learning to eat and giving something to eat, learning to
give something to eat to the other. The law of “eating well” is a law of infinite hospitality: we
mustn’t ever eat alone. The host is the guest—in this double entendre, active and passive, the hosted
is the host—but is also the outsider, the foreigner, the enemy. Hostipitalité, Derrida tells us in
another essay entitled Of Hospitality: hospitality/hostility. And hospes cooks. Makes something to
eat, gives something to eat, receives something to eat. The law of hospitality is also a low of
conviviality. Though I do not know if he was familiar with it, I am certain Derrida would have liked

8
the myth of Philemon and Baucis told by Ovid in the eight book of the Metamorphoses: Jupiter and
Mercury, disguised as humans, cross the Phrygian and seek hospitality. No one receives them, with
the exception of a poor old couple, Philemon and Baucis. In their modest place of abode, a shack
made of mud and reeds, they offer the two gods simple food and shelter. This tale is an apology for
hospitality towards the unkown and foreign newcomer; an hospitality declined in terms of
unconditional conviviality. The same Kant, the denier of physical taste, of degustation as an
aesthetic experience, besides being gourmet in private, indicates, in the rich and undervalued work
that is Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, the final goal of humanity, that is the accord
of happiness and moral virtue, in a sort of human sociability exemplified by “a good meal in good
company (and if possible, also altering company)” 18. It is an extraordinary fact that has not been
commented upon by its exegetes nor by the aware and unaware epistemological continuers, faithful
to the stipulation according to which the knowing of and search for truth should not have flavor or
taste, lest they be conditioned by necessities and needs.

Second Dish (Derrida, the Guest)

Unassimable, vomit, limits of digestion, de-hierarchization of senses, meat and carnality, recall
perhaps the most important notion, and certainly most familiar, of all of Derrida’s cogitations:
writing. Writing as “spacing” (espacement) and as “temporalization” (temporalisation), in the
language of the early Derrida, and writing as biography and autobiography of animals, in his mature
and final language. Deconstruction is more than a language: The tongue—the mouth—is a
complex perceptive system, an explorer of tastes, consistencies, shapes, an emitter of sounds, a
sexual and social medium, the first relationship of man with another and with the world as shown
by the sucking of the in-fans. Before we speak, we taste. If writing precedes the word phoné, in a
deconstructive sense, then writing is taste.
In 1991 a book called Jacques Derrida comes out, and is written by Geoffrey Bennington and
by J.D. himself. On the back of the cover of the book is a strange phrase that seals this relationship:
our signature dish is written by Jacques Derrida: “Dès qu’il est saisi par l’écriture, le concept est
cuit.” In French, saisir means to seize, to take hold of, to catch but also to brown on a high flame.
“As soon as writing gets hold of it, the concept’s goose is cooked” 19. A metaphor for fire, more
accurately for cooking on a flame, defines the relationship between writing and concept. Writing as
cooking recalls the myth of Promotheus, or fire as a path to civility, but not only this. On one hand,
the concept is cooked because it is no longer raw and, therefore, ready to be eaten—it is the mother,
the writing (not philosophy), who prepared it and cooked it to perfection for men. Perhaps, the

9
father went hunting and killed the animal; but it is the mother who cooks it. On the other hand,
precisely because the mother is not a philosopher the concept is cooked, because it is no longer
pure; it has been altered. The mother is in the kitchen, surrounded by dead foods, their smells and
their tastes; how could she philosophize?
“Do you think that the philosopher ought to care about the pleasures—if they are to be called
pleasures—of eating and drinking?” suggests Socrates in Phaedo. Cooking is writing; this is a
necessarily altering and “violent” gesture, according to the gesture previously pointed out in regards
to the carnivore. We mustn’t think that raw food escapes such alteration: the most radical crudist
vegetarians choose the crudity with which to nourish themselves too, according to a precise cultural
and conceptual system which is evidenced by the events of hermits narrated in the Lives of the
Saints or—according to an opposite and specular process—in a film like Into the Wild, in which the
protagonist, completely trusting his nature-being, dies as he is incapable of distinguishing between
edible plants and poisonous ones. Deconstruction disjoints the wild and the Saint, suggesting that
writing is a method of cooking that is less invasive than orality (let us recall exemplorality), more
respectful of the object to be cooked, the subject to be dealt with. Actually, writing leaves the door
open, at least as a possibility of infinite hospitality, without conditions: an opening to that
unconditional conviviality described in the myth of Philemon and Baucis. It is not so much the
(impossible) road of non-cooking as it is the responsible road of cooking without consumption,
without assimilation.
This procedure would be incomprehensible without its ethical and political architecture. In a
conference in 1998, dedicated to the topic of translation in relation to mercy and justice, the word,
chosen from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, as an example of the (im)possibility of
translation—“ no word is untranslatable, no word is translatable—is “relevant(e)”, an English and
French term. After a lengthy analysis of a few portions of the Shakespearean work, Derrida
encounters the expression “when mercy seasons justice”, which the French translator expressed as
“when mercy tempers (tèmpere) justice”. Now, to season means to flavour, “to mix, to cause to
change, to modify, to temper, to dress good or to affect a climate, a sense of taste or quality. Let’s
not forget that this speech began by trying to describe ‘the quality of mercy’” 20. Derrida proposes
to substitute témperer with relever: “when mercy lifts justice”. This is so because relever in French
means to flavour, to bring out the taste of something by adding more taste: relever le goût. Here the
metaphor of taste still plays a decisive role in the case of mercy: “mercy keeps the taste of justice”,
and “here is the first reason to translate seasons with “relève,” which effectively preserves the
gustatory code and the culinary reference of to season, “assaisonner”: to season with spice, to
spice.” 21 Mercy without conditions, just as convivial hospitality, adds taste to justice; it maintains

10
it, emphasizes it, intensifying it and, therefore, alters it. The taste of justice is mercy; and it would
be opportune to remember that Derrida had proposed to use the same réveler to translate the
Hegelian Aufheben (Aufhebung), the process of elevation that substitutes while maintaining, just as
cooking does.
Contrary to expectation, deconstructive writing appears to be constituted by an essential
gustatory dimension (cooking, manipulation, seasoning); writing is not “philosophy”, it is not lost
in the concept; it cooks it, it maintains it, it alters it. It seasons the concept. Writing is what we
previously called thinking, in its double connection, in its disjointed relationship with philosophy.
For this, many “serious” philosophers hated deconstruction and hated Derrida: too much taste, too
much flavor, and therefore a (presumed) separation from neutral truth. On the other hand, this does
not mean that deconstruction advocates the case of “artificial aromas” and of sophistication: it is not
vegetarian, vegan, crudist nor fruitarian. It has been seen, rather, as flexitarian: little meat, the least
possible, and cooked just slightly, in the least invasive manner possible. Between cooked and raw,
is cultivation. And not just any meat: not bacterial chicken or animals that are raised and then
slaughtered according to the anonymous industry of mechanized planetary alimentation (as
Heidegger had already emphasized in another context) but a meat that we take care of and that is
important to us. What becomes of taste, then? It is evident that it shall be rethought out according to
a new scheme.

Dessert (Derrida, the Neogastronomist)

Writing and animals have something in common: they do not respond. Derrida reminds us of
this in The Animal That Therefore I Am, referring to the observations in Plato’s Phaedrus and
those—of Aristotle and Lacan—according to which a fundamental difference between man and
animal is the one between response and reaction. Man responds because he is equipped with an
actual language; animals react22. Therefore, Derrida observes, there is an animality in writing, and
in the same way, we have shown that there is an animality in taste: taste, from this perspective, does
not respond too. That is its secret, as a limit between being able to be shared and being unable to be
shared, between being able to be assimilated and being unable to be assimilated. Here we find the
relationship between taste and animality in light of deconstruction as writing. Can they taste? The
question reflects the “preliminary and decisive question” can they suffer? that Derrida retrieves
from Jeremy Bentham.

11
 In a chapter entitled “Violence Against Animals” of the book, For What Tomorrow, written
with Elisabeth Roudinesco, Derrida maintains that he is unable to theoretically support any simple
discourse on the “rights of animals”, because the concept of rights falls entirely within a
metaphysics of assimilation, within the paradoxical suppression of differences; and he reasserts that,
as a consequence, he would be unable to support any rigidly vegetarian position, as he could never
allow himself the scenario of total deprivation of meat: “in a more or les refined, subtle, sublime
form, a certain cannibalism remains unsurpassable” […] And it is basically the same form of
23
transubstantiation—‘of course one must eat/ one must eat well’”. At the same time, however,
Derrida confirms his liking for and his support of any position that wishes to change the
relationships—practical as well as theoretical—between animals and humans.
Cruelty towards animals has reached levels never before reached: slaughtering, industrial
agriculture, genetic engineering. The violence against animals on behalf of the agricultural industry
is comparable to a perverted genocide, as it takes the form of a “natural” annihilation for the benefit
of “artifical” overproduction: hormonalized and hyperproductive pseudo-animals are reared and
prepared for the industrial slaughterhouses. This topic is revisited also in The Animal That
Therefore I Am: the “industrial, mechanical, chemical, hormonal, and genetic violence to which
man has been submitting animal life for the past two centuries. Everybody knows what the
production, breeding, transport, and slaughter of these animals has become”24. All of this is
unacceptable. And so, what results is the maximum fondness for and complicity with all animal
activist philosophies and with their practices, notwithstanding their ingenuousness from a
deconstructive point of view.
In response to one of Roudinesco’s objections, according to which agricultural and animal
industrialization has nevertheless saved many human lives from hunger (an objection that, perhaps
even without knowing or wanting to, imitates the objection of large multinational industries against
craftmanship, small-scale productions and high gastronomical quality) Derrida observes that “the
consumption of meat has never been a biological necessity. One eats meat not simply because one
needs protein—and protein can be found elsewhere” 25. A position that explicitly takes part in the
debates of contemporary dietetics. But here is an explicit reference to taste and gastronomy: Derrida
responds to Roudinesco’s subsequent objection, which joins the consumption of meat to the values
of a cultural tradition—French, for example:

There are other resources available for our gastronomic refinement. Industrial meat is not the last word in
gastronomy. Besides, more and more—you’re aware of this debate—certain people prefer beasts raised in certain
conditions said to be more “natural,” on certain types of fields, etc. Therefore, it will be necessary, in the name of the
very gastronomy you’re speaking of, to transform practices and mentalities26.

12
 Decostruction is in the name of a new gastronomy, then. For a tactical matter inseparable from a
strategic one deconstruction is flexitarian and sympathetic towards all of the ingenuous animalisms.
First of all, respect and care for animals against the reduction of diversity among species, the
massification of production and genetic and hormonal manipulation. As stated at the beginning, it is
precisely because of this—in an outwardly paradoxical way—that Derrida is (was) not a
gastronomist: to him the classical notion appeared compromised with the anthropocentric
humanism explicitly demanded by Brillat-Savarin and emphasized in many practices by many
gastronomists. Gourmandise, gluttony, seemed to him to be acts of violence and of excessive
assimilation, an arrogance of presumed liberty (the gastronomy of man) against the constrains of
necessity and needs (animal/alimentation). In an interiew one time he stated that it is not much of a
surprise that Gadamer, insofar as mentor of hermeneutics, was “such a gluttonous thinker” 27.
Derrida was simple and sparing in his gastronomical choices—I can testify personally—just as
he was simple in his way of life and his behaviors. Yet, as we have seen, his thinking approaches a
new gastronomical possibility: the transformation of the same concept that derives from a reduction
of its carnivorous-logocentric charge.

Coffee and Pastries (Derrida, In the Kitchen)

Deconstruction is flexitarian, postulates a new gastronomy, because it sympathizises with
animal activists and environmentalists. From an old gastronomy to a new gastronomy. At the heart
of this transformation are the notions of hospitality and animality, and a consequent (or previous)
revision of food and taste. The deconstruction of anthropocentric taste, human too human,
logocentric-carnivore, corresponds to the prologue to the bare gaze of an animal, to the nudity of
tasting without assimilating. The transformation is all but simple. I wish to conclude by explaining
the reason for this with an example which I hope will be clear by the end of this rather filling meal.
The occasion from which the idea for this work arose was the viewing of the film on Derrida by
Dick and Kofman: a biography through images that is, clearly, also a reflection on biographies and
images. According to classical philosophical tradition—which Derrida describes and teaches us—
biographies are “indecent and ill-mannered”; it is the empirical indecency of the ordinary and the
common against the politeness of philosophical life, shaped upon the subtraction of the
inessential—among which are, above all, physical bodies, the very body of the philosopher who
lives by and within his works. Deconstruction is the practice that introduces the empirical, the
biographical, the ordinary and the vulgar in the core, and along the periphery, of philosophy.
Naturally, this does not mean that a biography—any biography: written, through images, etc.—

13
expresses the “truth” of life against the “lies” of a work: no (auto)biography is ever “pure” and
“true”. The fact remains, though, that philosophy has a problem with biographies, in the same way
that it has a problem with cuisine and with taste. And, performatively, this is also valid for and in
Derrida. As I wrote in the beginning, eating, according to Derrida, is also the eating of Derrida, and
Derrida is (was) a (great) philosopher. Even in the film he reasserts that the consideration of
biographies in philosophy does not mean eliminating reticence, modesty in narration, or the
necessity to look towards what we think and write rather than how we live and eat. At least in
philosophy.
As a matter of fact, this double movement emerges with clarity in the film. Derrida goes to the
barber for a haircut, smokes his pipe, converses, and briefly describes his first encounter with
Marguerite. Also his cat appears, the very cat from The Animal That Therefore I am. And then there
is Derrida in the brasserie eating and talking, Derrida who eats chips and drinks Champagne at his
sister’s husband’s house in Algeria and, above all, Derrida at home, in the kitchen. There are three
kitchen and food scenes in the philosopher’s home: the first (at 31’) captures Derrida making
breakfast, with butter and honey, while Marguerite gives him a kiss on the forehead and leaves the
house. The male philosopher in the kitchen eating, the female who kisses his forehead and goes off
to work: an inverted scene: the world turned upside down. The second (at 41’) shows Derrida while
he prepares coffee. In the third (46/47’), he takes some eggplant from a glass container being
conserved in the refrigerator and he dresses them with salt and oil. Ordinary and vulgar scenes that,
for inessential philosophy, are ill-mannered and even indecent. Deconstruction has taught us that
this is not so, that the empirical is not different from the essential. But deconstruction is not only
writing; it is also (mostly?) philosophy. In fact, in the special features that accompany the film,
there is the encounter between the public and Derrida and his directors at the preview of the film.
When a spectator asks if there had been any scenes eliminated from the film by the philosopher,
Jacques and the directors respond: two scenes, actually. The first, Jackie says, is actually a
combination of fragments that showed Marguerite in the kitchen: it would not have been right, it
would have given the wrong image of her, because I am at home more than she is (I make breakfast,
she leaves the house). The second, adds Amy Kofman, is the yogurt scene: Derrida did not want to
include the scene in which he was eating yogurt…
Between writing and philosophy, between nature and cooking/cultivation/culture, Derrida
leaves us with a specter, in the form of a task: the elaboration of a new “gastronomy”, and perhaps
the very name will no longer be suitable. Finding a new scheme of taste at the margins of
philosophy is a legacy of deconstruction. It does not, in fact, remain seated while eating and
speaking; it is not completely comfortable in conversations with men, conducted by men; it often

14
gets up and leaves the table. It misses many ideas from the “discussions”, it does not “conduct” the
conversations, nor does it direct thinking: “deconstruction does not wish to be right”, Derrida once
wrote. Deconstruction must—it is its duty and responsibility, like a good mother—also cook.

1
See D. Goldstein, Emnanuel Levinas and the Ontology of Eating, Gastronomica, vol. 10, no. 3, 34-44, 2010.
2
See for instance C. Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste. Food and Philosophy (Cornell University Press, Ithaca &

London, 1999); S. Shapin, “Philosopher and the Chicken”, in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural

Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Food & Philosophy ed. by F. Allhoff and Dave Monroe

(Malden, Oxford: Blackwell, Oxford, 2007.

3
S. Shapin, “Philosopher and the Chicken”, 21-23.
4
Jean-Althelme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste; Or, Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy, eng. trans.

by M.F.K. Fisher (New York: George Macy Companies, Inc., 1949), 3.

5
Ivi, 44.
6
Ivi., 45.
7
Ivi, 44.
8
Ivi, 14, my italics.
9
J. Derrida, Economimesis, 16, my italics.
10
Ivi, 21.
11
J. Derrida, “‘Il faut bien manger’ ou le calcul du sujet”, in J. Derrida, Points de suspension. (Paris: Gaillée. 1992)

292, my trans.
12
Ivi, 293, my trans., my italics.
13
Ivi. 294, my trans.
14
Ivi, 295, my trans.
15
Derrida, di Kirby Dick e Amy Kofman (2002).
16
Derrida will return to these topics in his seminar from 2001 on “The Beast and the Sovereign”.
17
Ivi, p. 296.
18
I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, translated and edited by Robert B. Louden (New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2006) 179.

19
G. Bennington – J. Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris, Seuil, 1991)

15
20
J. Derrida, “What is a “Relevant” Translation?” in Critical Inquiry, Lawrence Venuti, Vol. 27, No 2 (Winter, 2001),

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press) 194.

21
Ivi, 195.
22
J. Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, edited by Marie-Louis Mallet, engl. trans. David Wills (New York,:

Fordham University Press, 2008), 84.

23
J. Derrida – E. Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow..., engl. trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004)

67, 160.
24
J. Derrida, The Animal, 26.
25
J. Derrida – E. Roudinesco, What Tomorrow, 71.
26
Ivi, p. 72.
27
D. Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, An Interview with Jacques Derrida on the Limits of Digestion, 25/10/1990, e-flux,

www.e-flux.com/journal/view/33.

16