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    Rights statement: © 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested

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I eat therefore I am: an essay on human and animal mutuality

Research output: Contribution to Journal/MagazineJournal articlepeer-review

Published
<mark>Journal publication date</mark>2013
<mark>Journal</mark>Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities
Issue number4
Volume18
Number of pages17
Pages (from-to)63-79
Publication StatusPublished
<mark>Original language</mark>English

Abstract

This essay provides an overview of seminal examples of Western thought (including the Bible, Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Heidegger) 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” (in the Deleuzian sense) 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.”

Bibliographic note

© 2014 The Author(s). Published by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested