Eat me: cannibalism and melancholia

PDF

Download

Open document

Transcript (if available)

Content

Eat Me: Cannibalism and Melancholia

A dissertation presented to the faculty of the USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree
Doctor of Philosophy
Division of Cinema and Media Studies

May 2016

Copyright 2015 Emily Perez

Acknowledgements

To Jonathan, for being so smart, so cool, and so very inspiring. More than you know.

To Aniko, for hanging in there with me across deserts both real and imaginary.

To J.B., “ ce monstre délicat,/hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!”

And last but never, ever least, to Aki, for all the help across these years, which seem to
have passed both quickly and slowly…

Thank you a million times over. This one’s for you, and you, and you, and you.

2

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 4
2. Jules et Jim: The Melancholiac as Cannibal 19
3. Trouble Every Day: The Cannibal as Melancholiac 49
4. Outsides, In; Insides, Out 78
5. Post Script: P.S. from P.S. 121
6. Conclusion 127
7. Bibliography 135
3

  Introduction

4

The history of the presence of cannibals in the New World
begins with the discovery of their absence
Michael PalenciaRoth

...the two kinds of matter toward which so much human
appetitive energy is directed: food and flesh.
Kyla WazanaTompkins

Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are
M.F.K Fisher

In 1972 Andre Green opened his essay in the Nouvelle Revue de Psychoanalyse called
Destins du Cannibalisme by asserting what he called the “paradoxe du cannibalisme”:
while anthropophagy was disappearing amongst the cultures which practiced it, our
cultural interest in the phenomenon continues to grow.

Green’s words get at the two of
1
the fundamental questions of this project: Why cannibalism? Why now? Taking
inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s invitation to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up
at a moment of danger”, this dissertation contends that the haunting figure of the
cannibal is a newly, uniquely edifying figure that embodies the most fundamental
aspects of humanity in contemporary culture.

There is something always retroactive about the narrative of the cannibal. He has no
traceable origin in history; as will be shown, there is no definitive sense, in the present or
the past, of its/the precise beginning of anthropophagy. Yet in other accounts/another
1
Andre Green as quoted in Peggy Reaves Sanday. Divine Hunger , (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 1.
5

sense the cannibal also represents all of our (human) nature before the sensibility of
civilization; indeed, across modernity cannibalism has signified the total primitive
otherness against which western rationality has measured itself. This dialectic, between
what Stuart Hall has called “the west and the rest” points to the ways that the imperial
project underpins European western modernity as a whole.

From within the confines of
2
imperialism’s own hegemonic narrative, cannibalism plagued the world beyond the
confines of Europe prior to “civilization.” As it was stamped out the threat of its return
remains, insistently percolating below the surface, ready to appear when civilizational
influence showed signs of waning.

But the primal scene of cannibalism is bereft of cannibals. The European settlers bore no
witness of the act itself; it was aftermath, rather than process, that suggested the
ferocious consumption of one human of another. This slippage is echoed in the Oxford
English Dictionary definition of cannibals as, “A fierce nation of the West Indies who
are recorded to have been anthropophagy.”

What hides behind that phrase “who are
3
recorded to have been”, indeed, is a different history altogether.

This dissertation does not purport to erect a boundary between cannibalisms literal and
metaphorical, precisely because the term from its very inception inextricably blurs these
categories. The question of whether cannibalism actually existed as a social practice in
2
Stuart Hall “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An
Introduction to Modern Societies (Hoboken: Wiley Press, 1996), 221.
3
Oxford English Dictionary.
6

takes a background to its very real existence within discourse, past and present. As Peter
Hulme asserts, “That existence, within discourse, is no less historical whether or not the
term cannibalism describes an attested or extant social custom…”

Attested or extant,
4
cannibalism has always been more powerful as mythos.

Taking heed from post colonialism’s important work on exposing the ideology of the
colonial project, a project predicated upon the designation of unnatural acts as a means
to naturalize its own ideology, here ‘cannibal’ will be regarded as a metonym for figures
of resistance and possessors of depraved hungers.

Such an expansion of the term allows
5
an exploration of questions fundamental to its usage, questions that form a welcome
bridge between the past and the present. Why did Europeans fixate upon their
suspicions of cannibalism in the colonies? Why is cannibalism important, here and now?
The function of cannibalism in the world today, it will be argued, lies in its utility as a
form of cultural criticism. As Maggie Kilgour argues, “Where in the past the figure of
the cannibal has been used to construct differences…it now appears in projects to
deconstruct them.”

With this historical proclamation as a starting point, the presentday
6
recurrence of cannibalism as a trope across disciplines (in a degree and kind that is
heretofore unprecedented) will be examined.

4
Peter Hulme, The Cannibal Scene” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World , eds
Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 88.
5
Kim Hall, Things of Darkness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 19.
6
Maggie Kilgour, From communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of
incorporation   (New York: Routledge, 1990), 242.
7

Cannibalism extends the blur between self and other by which psychoanalysis kills the
sovereign subject; it does so by centering quite literally on the body. As Julia Kristeva
suggests, the acquisition of subjectivity depends upon matricidethe physical tongue
leaves behind the maternal breast and in its stead develops the metaphorical tongue that
is speechbut the terror of the loss of the mother haunts the acquisition of speech such
that fear and desire of linguistic operation contemporaneously.
7

What happens when one can’t, or won’t, speak? In its first two chapters, this dissertation
turns towards the long history of connection between melancholy and cannibalism. The
cannibalistic Saturn is both the ruler of the Golden Age and the God of Melancholy.
Freud lowers his eyes in shame when he defines the melancholic as the one who holds
onto love in spite of everything and does so unto suicide, which can be seen as a fatal
form of autocannibalism. The films I examine here are united by/depict
inward/outward melancholy. I suggest that the darkest repressed wishes of the
melancholiac are to make one body out of two; accordingly, she/he threatens
herself/himself with that punishment which is alone fitting for his unconscious
cannibalistic impulses, i.e., death by starvation. Whether death and starvation are literal
or metaphorical, it is from this purview melancholy and cannibalism are connected in the
films at hand.

7
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection . (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 7.
8

Chapter one examines Jules et Jim . While there are no actual peopleeatingpeople in
this film, the characters and the premise of the film are read as deeply melancholiac to
the point of cannibalizing themselves and the world around them as well. Relationality
and identification (even failed ones) come to function as an endless process of
extinguishing and consuming the other in whom the subject sees herself/himself
reflected. Just as cannibals are driven by an appetite or hunger that consistently exceeds
the boundaries of culture’s sacrosanct regulatory scheme, so too do these characters
attempt to create their own world, a time out of time and a place without place. What
starts off as a surfeit of desire, a devouring of the world and the others cedes to a desert
of unsatiated hungers. By rejecting these fundamental hungers—indeed, by moving from
surfeits to droughts of desire— consequently undertake the slow process of consuming
themselves to death.

Chapter two demonstrates how through a very different means Trouble Every Day
arrives at a similar end: that is, it links melancholy with cannibalism by showing literal
cannibals as melancholiacs. Here cannibalism is both symptom and disease. Our two
cannibals, Coré and Shane, pass the time between kills, sort of. When they aren’t killing
they wish they were dead: there is no in between, no living, except in these moments of
death. We see the evidence of their carnage but we never really see them.

The melancholy cannibals also turn their appetites inward. If the mouth is the doorway
into the consuming body, making it a body that is open to food and open to the other—in
9

the case of the literal cannibal, both—it is also the point of entre into the body that is
closed, one that consumes not the other but, rather, itself.

Following the aforementioned two chapters, which operate as two halves of one whole,
the lens of examination widens. We return briefly to the colonial roots of the term in
order to historicize its present usage. How cannibalism has structured debates about the
production of the “other” requires an interrogation of its relation to the self. Postcolonial
counter narratives seek support from the language of psychoanalysis to argue that the
figure of the cannibal is a projection of European fantasies, a screen for colonial
violence. However, psychoanalysis—particularly in the classical Freudian
model—offers only ambivalent support for this view. Freud has his own cannibal
narrative, one that is part of a universal story of psychic development rather than one
that is interested in distinctions between the colonizers and the colonized.

In Totem and
8
Taboo Freud all but suggests that anthropophagy is a natural occupation, as proved by
his remark about the Australian aborigines.
9

In both anthropological and psychoanalytic literature, cannibalism is the desire to make
what is other same, to annihilate or assimilate the other by incorporation. But from an
ontological perspective, cannibalism annihilates the difference between self and the
8
This not a monolithic recouperation, to be sure.
9
Freud’s exact phrasing: “the most backward and miserable of savages…these poor
naked cannibals.” Quoted in Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed .
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.
10

eaten other, making one body where there once were two.

The cannibal act can (and
10
should) be seen paradoxically: in one sense, cannibalism acknowledges and performs
sameness, for in the very repudiation of the consumption of one human by another lies
an admission that we are related; on the level of epistemology, however, cannibalism
constructs difference. Hence cannibalism participates in the fundamental “impossibility”
of mourning, in that the desire to incorporate the other within the self fundamentally
destroys its alterity or otherness and consequently negates the other.

The cannibal can be used to address the boundary confusions built into the self/other
interplay. Here we pay particular attention to the long history of linkage between
homosexuality and cannibalism. If “Gay sex has always been cannibal murder” it is
because it can only appear as always cannibalistic not just because of Totem and Taboo ,
(or the amazing gay footnotes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Civilization and its
Discontents, but also because it is a primal prohibition: it is before meaning as such.
Given the ideas of endogamy and exogamy together with ideas of eating the same versus
eating the other—homophagy vs. allophagy?—one can see how these paradoxical
concepts lead to a new kind of understanding of the link between sexuality and
consumption. From the initially contradictory angles of fear and desire. The cannibal
terrorizes us not in her/his will to eat us but in our will to be eaten . This in fact is Freud’s
“dark continent”, apposite but not opposite of his literal explanation thereof. Desire
itself craves bodily intrusion even as it fears it. The language of love and eating and the
10
Kilgour, 244.
11

conflation of appetites for all the things our mouths consume serve as but one example.
This pivotal convergence between food and sexuality ushers in a move to affect studies
with a focus on its engagement with “taste” and “disgust.” Indeed, the mere selection of
the word “taste” to describe refinement in choice functions as a sign of the importance of
the sensory body (and a referent to the cannibal) in such judgments.

After all, as Stallybrass and White tell us, “The bourgeois subject continuously defined
and redefined itself through the exclusion of what it marked out as ‘low’—as dirty,
repulsive, noisy, contaminating. Yet that very act of exclusion was constitutive of its
identity. The low was internalized under the sign of negation and disgust…”

  Disgust,
11
which finds itself on the outer edges of the canon of affect studies, is extremely relevant
at this juncture. regards disgust is the absolute other in the system of taste. The
cannibal is a figure who straddles the line between fascination and repulsion.

An attention to cannibalism allows a broader consideration of hunger and desire.” If
sexuality has been the privileged arena for our understandings of truth and identity, the
question of who we are and want to be is now being debated in the realm of food “

At
12
one hand, cannibalism is strongly evocative of the general conflation of concerns about
colonial, capitalist and sexual appetites. Marxian critiques of consumption continue
Marx’s original metaphors about capitalism and cannibalism while also acknowledging
11
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression . Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986.
12
Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 80
12

that consumption and desire always, and perhaps in the face of late capitalism,
increasingly suggest the overlap of each other. However, beyond the phenomenological
realm, hunger brings with it a swath of connotations and complications. Lauren Berlant
reminds us of the disgust of surfeiting desire. the binge smoker who finds something
about cigarettes or chocolate repulsive after consuming too many in one sitting, the
disgust of surfeiting desire, which also has the power to make the one who is disgusted
disgusting by and to herself, makes the object of desire (literally, sometimes) intolerable.

13

Such concepts allow a move beyond affect to the modes of distinction between self and
other to an understanding of how powerful hunger is as a life force. Just as there are so
many forms of hunger(s) there too are so many meanings around cannibalism. The literal
eating of one person by another is most easily understood as a satisfaction of hunger in
moments of desperation. But in other moments/contexts it brings with it vitality and
virility, an elimination of weaknesses of the body and clarity for the mind. So too with
the metaphorical iterations of cannibalism. Divinely sanctioned cannibalism would be
one of the most strange and pervasive examples thereof. “Eating is, after all the great
mystery of Christianity, the transubstantiation occurs in the act of incorporation itself:
bread and wine become the flesh and blood of Christ. But it is not simply God’s body
that is incorporated via a mystical eating—it is also his words.”
14
13
e.g., “the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution…”
14
SP Holland, “On the Visceral” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies . Duke
University Press Volume 20, no. 4, December 2014.62.
13

It would follow that our experience of abjection (gets at the perverse allure of the
cannibal for us. In a sense this allure can be distilled to the threatened erosion of the
boundary, or distinction, between subject and object, or self and other, or self and
cannibal. Certainly the concept of cannibalism is an extreme example of the
interdependent nature of eating and the flexible relation between self and other. The
abject is precisely not an object; it is that which marks the blur between subject and
object, that which the ruse of the “one” cannot get rid of. Cannibalism functions in a
similar manner: it is the primal deed—the primal deed that is not one—that we cannot
get rid of. In other words, its eruption in discourse was bound to happen.

Recent decades have witnessed a renewed interest in studies that privilege the body.
Perhaps the most complex materiality of all, the body is increasingly regarded as a nexus
of intricate interplays as well as a location of knowledge that is critical to our experience
of the world. Here the scope of this dissertations broadens from the sexuality of
consumption to the viscerality of consumption that is eating. An engagement with what
Kyla Wazana Tompkins posits in her phrase “Queer Alimentarity” and, later, in the
espousal of the burgeoning field of Critical Eating Studies, allows a move beyond the
surfaces and skins that have dominated body studies and into a deeper analysis that
14

reveals, as I will argue, the often obscure processes by which the mouth, and eating, and
the cultural narratives around them construct identity.

Beginning from the convergence of gender and sexuality with food studies enabled by
the burgeoning field of Critical Eating Studies, (they do remain linked; as the authors of
one particular journal article put it, “We aimed for the gut and we got the ass”) this third
chapter devote rigorous attention to one of the most quotidian components of our daily
life: eating. The nexus of such a convergence also comes from discourses of taste, desire,
disgust and appetite. When does eating become sex and sex become eating? Why is
Critical Eating Studies emerging here and now? Shifting from food to eating allows a
move beyond—beneath—the epidermis and into the terrain of the visceral, the “gut.”
Following this “geography of the gut” comes a new framework of connections , of
iterations and reiterations of systemic oppression and regulation of identity and
exploration of “a space where nonnormative desires can be played out…mouth as site
of radical and problematic pleasures.”
15

The violence and the eroticism of eating, of food and of flesh, as one wholly consumes
the object being eaten. At the same time, eating performs a kind of vulnerability to the
world, revealing a fundamental interdependence between the eater and that which exists
outside her body. The cannibal is the perfect figure to embody these insidious systems
and help to unlock their meaning(s). As Tompkins states, “It is the many “whys” of
15
Kyla Wazana Tompkins et al, “On the Visceral” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies . Duke University Press Volume 20, no. 4, December 2014.
15

eating—the differing imperatives of hunger, necessity, pleasure, nostalgia, and
protest—that most determine its meanings.   Reckoning with each of these
interrogatives, by turning them into interrogatives…begins to get at the materialist
conditions that determine how, and why, to borrow from Judith Butler, the matter of
food comes to “matter.”
16

We continue to be fascinated and haunted by the figure of the cannibal. Even as the
accounts of them are increasingly shown to be problematic. He remains a useful figure to
address the messy, sticky entanglements of substances and feelings, bodies and minds,
matter and affect. By putting the cannibal in conversation with new scholarship from
dominant theoretical fields of inquiry in today’s world we can seek to unpack the
production of our identities vis a vis our complex myriad of appetites.

Jacques Derrida, for whom even the act of thinking can be understood as a symbolic
form of eating—he coins the term “carnophallogocentrism” to express the connections
between intellectual thought, psychoanalytic incorporation and cannibalism—argues for,
“…The very notion of comprehending as a kind of incorporation...we assimilate and
(this) acts as a kind of sublimated eating—everything shall be incorporated into the great
digestive system—nothing is inedible in Hegel’s infinite metabolism.”

The figure of
17
the cannibal emphasizes the most human of attributes, as well as designating the limit
16
Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion , (New York: NYU Press, 2012), 15.
17
Jacques Derrida quoted in Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson, “An Interview with
Jacques Derrida on The Limits of Digestion”, printed in eflux , 2009.
16

beyond which humanity is understood to no longer exist. This examination will extend
beyond the phenomenological realm: that is, from the figure of the cannibal to what in
Derridian terms are the multidisciplinary “tropes of cannibalism.” These tropes are
exceptionally powerful in the contemporary world.

The inassimilable specter of things like cannibalism (not unlike incest or patricide, the
other Freudian taboos) was once the very grounds of dividing the literal (primitive) from
the figurative (the civilized; the sublimated). Freud tries and fails to analogize a primal
past with modern personal and political aggressions. But traces of this inassimilable
specter extend to all social institutions of particular import in the twentieth century. This
conjunction is crucial not just for an understanding of the development of European
colonialism but for that of capitalist modernity itself. The modern Cartesian subject of
that capitalist modernity depends for its sense of self as independent entity on an image
of a clearly differentiated ‘other’ who destroys boundaries; put differently, “modernity
enters the world’s stage attached to a cannibal shadow.”

As a threshold figure, the
18
cannibal brings unites so very many competing aspects underlying western identity. And
so it is perhaps not surprising that at the end of a century of spectacular slaughter, on the
heels of the mechanized violence of two world wars, among so many others, that shadow
18
Michael PalenciaRoth, “The Cannibal Law of 1503,” in Early Images of the
Americas: Transfer and Invention , eds Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis. Tucson
and London: University of Arizona Press, 1993, 101.

17

would reemerge. The cannibal has returned to haunt Western societies, from which, of
course, it originally came.




18

Jules et Jim : The Melancholiac as Cannibal

19

The melancholiac is a riven being, torn between madness and a
general lucidity, between darkness and sublime illumination. The
history of the question of melancholy is played out within the
framework of this dialectic.
19
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

Jaques: More, more, I prithee more.
Ami: It will make you melancholy, Monsieur Jaques.
Jaques: I think it. More, I prithee more. I can suck melancholy
out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs. More, I prithee more.

20
William Shakespeare, As You Like It

The following two chapters address the deeply entwined relationship between
melancholy and cannibalism. Psychoanalysis has most closely and rigorously labored to
associate the concepts of melancholy and cannibalism, and yet their relation remains
enigmatic. In order to historicize contemporary notions of melancholy, this chapter will
first consider its earliest psychoanalytic conceptions by tracing the seminal lodestar of
Freud’s work in the second and third decades of the 20th century.
21
19
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn (New York:
Schoken Books Inc, 1950), 143.
20
As quoted in Daniel Birnbaum & Anders Olsson, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay
on Melancholy and Cannibalism , trans. Brian Manning Delaney (New York: Sternberg
Press, 2008), 11. “Some deem Jacques as the only purely contemplative character in all
of Shakespeare.    Hazlitt describes him as "the prince of philosophical idler; his only
passion is thought; he sets no value upon anything but as it serves as food for reflection."
21
As Brian Manning Delaney suggests, English has two nouns that derive from the greek
word melainchole: melancholy and melancholia . Likewise the person suffering from it
can, in English, be referred to either as a melancholic or a melancholiac . British English
has generally preferred melancholy and, for the individual, melancholic , whereas
American usage tends to draw a distinction between a condition that primarily affects the
soul, which is referred to as melancholy , for tempermental afflictions, and melancholia
for those of a physical nature (accordingly the person suffering from the former would
20

Two canonical films, Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim and Claire Denis’ Trouble Every
Day, will be employed to broaden the scope of how the symbiotic nature of these two
phenomena, disturbed and disturbing alike, might be newly conceived.

Melancholy has frequently been figured as self–affecting, a kind of cuisine that feeds
upon itself. Just as Shakespeare’s despondent Jaques remains so besotted with his own
melancholy that he prefers versifying it in monologue to transcending it, the
melancholiac invents the means by which he can continue his own plight. As Daniel
Birnbaum and Anders Olsson observe, “[t]he melancholiac is a predator with a
boundless appetite for the most sublime food. He is not only a bestial cannibal, like
Stavrogin [of Dostoyevsky’s Demons ], but also a refined weasel, like Jaques.”
22

Both the melancholiac and the cannibal are characterized by a pathological hunger and
yet each intake of food is associated with extreme danger. Beyond a tendency to
struggle with the literal intake of food, the melancholiac struggles with a hunger for
something far beyond the ordinary and often beyond the bounds of possibility. For in
his appetite for the extraordinary, the melancholiac, like the cannibal, violates the
borders of the sacrosanct regulatory schemata of his culture. This chapter will trace that
desire for an extraordinary—extraordinary—“food” and suggest that in the futile
be a melancholic , the person suffering from the latter, a melancholiac ). The American
usage will serve as the model for these two chapters while eschewing any distinction
between the mental and physical afflictions.
22
Ibid, 12.
21

attempts to satiate a hunger for something extraordinary, the melancholiac becomes
afflicted with a form of cannibalistic impulse.

One can speak of various strategies for expressing melancholy. The complementary yet
distinct natures of the melancholiac will be exemplified through two Jules et Jim and
Trouble Every Day , which respectively occupy the two poles of melancholy as it relates
to cannibalism. The melancholy of Jules et Jim leads to a kind of autocannibalism:
instead of consuming the other, or perhaps because they cannot consume the other, the
subjects consume themselves. “The melancholiac,” Julia Kristeva posits, “is a wounded
Narcissus who is bound to his suffering.”

In this film, no one of the trio of protagonists
23
can release another; they remain willfully trapped in a corrosive inertia wherein the lost
object(s) are not yet lost but also can never be found.

While the melancholy of Jules et Jim is inward and selfaffecting, that of Trouble Every
Day is projected out onto the world. The former is a world of terrible scarcity, while the
latter is one of an abundance of sentiment, of literal cannibalism as a manic, outward
expression of inner appetites. That is, in two very different ways, the melancholiac is
afflicted with cannibalism: we see the aggrandizement of selves both over and under
nourished in Jules et Jim ; we bear witness to the ravenous surfeit of hungers alternately
expressed and sublimated in Trouble Every Day . But they are two poles of one
23
Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989), 111.
22

continuum and, as such, everything or nothing, feasting or starving—both too much and
not enough—are the fates of the melancholiac.

Although melancholia has a preFreudian history—one that will be explored later in this
chapter—it is arguably its formative status in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory that
accounts for its enduring interest as a cultural signifier in contemporary discourse.

The concise, dense "Mourning and Melancholia" (1915) is a pendant to his previous
work “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914).

In these two papers, both written in a
24
period of unprecedented political and social turmoil, Freud codifies the challenges one
experiences when attempting to preserve an image of the bounded subject. More
broadly, these can be understood as a struggle to distinguish between the inner and outer
worlds. He describes the essence of melancholia by contrasting it against the “normal”
process of mourning.

His definition of “normal” mourning is terribly broad and
25
includes both the reaction of a subject to the loss of a loved one as well as his response
to any future substitution thereof. He describes mourning as a slow and steady
detachment from the beloved. The process of detachment is typified by allconsuming
immersion in grief—a grief yoked to the pain of painful memories—and an
accompanying loss of interest in the outside world. Furthermore, this internal work of
24
Both works were not formally published for several years after they were written.
These dates refer to the years in which they were originally written.
25
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (19141916): On the
History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works ,
ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976), 246.
23

grieving is utterly impervious to the passage of time. Freud insists that the “normal”
mourning subject must abandon the beloved, lost object in order to reclaim a “normal”
psychological state and to resume engagement with the world at large.

If the stage of
26
mourning is not successfully transcended, the subject will slip into melancholia, a state
in which “the patient is aware of the loss which has given rise to his melancholia, but
only in the sense that he knows whom he has lost but not what he has lost in him.”
27

Unlike “normal” mourning, in melancholia the lost object is not renounced. Here part of
the ego is identified with the loved object and then treated as if it is an external object,
and “in this way an objectloss is transformed into an ego loss.” To achieve this the ego
devotes a part of itself to sustaining a connection with the lost object, which is done by
identifying with that object.

While the process of melancholia is aimed at repairing the wound of an intolerable loss
suffered by the ego, its effect is hardly reparative. Because the subject never slackens its
investment in the lost loved one, he remains utterly unable to transition that sentiment, or
cultivate new love, for a different object. This inability sets off a vicious cycle of
painfully ambivalent feelings towards the lost object. Eventually the ambivalence fades
26
Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (19141916): On the
History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works ,
ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976), 73.
27
Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (19141916): On the
History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works ,
ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976), 248.
24

and the newly ugly feelings now take aim at the shadow of the object remaining in the
ego.

Melancholiac selfdepreciation is actually directed at the love object itself, as it were, but
instead of withdrawing cathexis, the subject now unconsciously identifies with (the
traces of) the nowhated object to which he remains ever more firmly attached. In
Freud’s phrasing, "[i]n mourning the world has become impoverished and empty, during
melancholia, it is the ego."
28

Freud once again revised his conceptions of mourning and melancholy in “The Ego and
the Id” (1923). As Tammy Clewell notes in “Mourning Beyond Melancholy,” the
impact of the Great War on Freud’s theoretical work was profound—even more so as he
began to revisit his earlier works in the years after the war ended. In particular, he
reconsidered and elaborated on his earlier theories on human aggression.

He came to
29
believe that the violence sweeping Europe was not an anomaly of geopolitical conditions
but rather an ahistorical fact of human existence, a fact that civilization cannot entirely
contain. In light of this shift, he revised components of a wide array of his previous
theories to reflect a new conception of aggression as a lamentable but unavoidable
dimension of human subjectivity.
30

28
Ibid.
29
Tammy Clewell, “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss”,
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association , vol. 52 (March 2004) , 54.
30
Ibid., 66.
25

Beyond the profound impact of the war, Freud’s revised understanding of aggression
reflected a newly complex appreciation of the significance of the mourning process.
“Mourning and Melancholia” suggests that mourning eventually ends, whereas the later
“The Ego and the Id” raises the possibility that the labor of grieving may be without
cessation. The process of identification previously associated with melancholia (i.e.,
“abnormal” grieving) is now redefined as a fundamental part of both subject formation
and mourning.
31

This revision of his mourning theory has significant implications for his theory of
melancholia, for it affixes to mourning the violent and hostile characteristics previously
associated with, and only with, melancholia. What he now understands is that the
identification process he previously connected to a pathological failure to
mourn—melancholia—in fact provides “the sole condition under which the id can give
up its objects.”

Further, it is in fact only by internalizing the lost other through the work
32
of bereaved identification, that one becomes a subject in the first place. Thus the rivalry
inherent in melancholiac identifications is essential. By collapsing the dichotomy of
mourning and melancholia Freud moves melancholia out of the pathological and into
what he conceives as a universalized human psyche.

31
Aida Alayarian, Trauma, Torture and Dissociation: A Psychoanalytic View , (London:
Karnac Books, 2011), 21.
32
Ibid., 29.
26

It is his newfound understanding of the interminable labor of grief that takes us beyond
Freud to theories of melancholy that more explicitly delves into the theme of
cannibalism.

In what constitutes both an extension and a critique of Freud’s work, his
33
contemporaries Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok—and, later, Jacques Derrida—
elaborate upon these earlier paradigms.

While they accept Freud’s account of “normal” mourning—though they emphasize
individual and idiosyncratic experience as key to understanding and accessing the depths
of the psyche—Abraham and Torok recast the lens through which “abnormal” forms of
mourning such as melancholia should be understood.

In Freud’s conceptualization of
34
melancholia, a part of the ego splits from the subject and identifies with the object of
loss. Abraham and Torok deem this process “encryptment,” or the entombing of an
other deep inside one’s ego. They write, “in endocryptic identification (one) exchanges
one’s own identity for a phantasmic identification with the ‘life’—beyond the grave—of
an object lost.”

This “crypt” is the locus of the melancholiac’s hidden tomb of psychic
35
concealments and it is here in this crypt, they argue, that the subject harbors the other:

…the crypt is comparable to the formation of a cocoon around the
chrysalis. Inclusion or crypt is a form of antiintrojection, a mechanism
whereby the assimilation of both the illegitimate idyll and its loss is
33
Although Freud posits the universality of cannibal narrative (and draws a connection
between the ambivalence of heart of cannibalism and melancholia) he falls short of
drawing an explicit link between the melancholiac and the cannibal.
34
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “‘The Lost Object—Me’: Notes on Endocryptic
Identifcation in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1 , ed.
Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 143.
35
Ibid., 144.
27

precluded. The “shadow of the object” strays endlessly about the crypt
until it is finally reincarnated in the person of the subject.
36

Abraham and Torok argue that the sense of shame experienced by the melancholiac is a
result of his “cannibalistic impulses” and as a consequence of this shame he punishes
himself through a variety of means.

But in the case of what they call unsuccessful
37
mourning, interiorization “goes only so far and then stops.” Penelope Deutscher asserts
that it is Abraham and Torok’s notion of the intrapsychic site of concealment, i.e., the
“crypt,” that for Jacques Derrida constitutes a pivotal shift around the figuration of
cannibalism.
38

For Derrida, the stages of mourning and melancholy, as well as their relationship to
cannibalism, figure differently: first, the subject loses the beloved, enters the stage of
what Freud calls “normal mourning.” It is this “normal mourning” that Derrida describes
with metaphors of digestion and cannibalism. Simply taking in the dead other is a
metaphorical and quasiliteral act of devouring her/him.

He writes, “The lost other
39
persists literally incorporated within my ego…the incorporated dead…continues to lodge
there like something other and to ventrilocate through the living... I kill it and remember
it… I interiorize it totally and it is no longer other.”
40
36
Ibid. 147.
37
Ibid.
38
Penelope Deutscher, “Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of
Friendship” in differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.3, (1998), 162.
39
Jacques Derrida, Memories: for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986), 71.
40
Ibid., 58.
28

For Derrida the term ‘incorporated’ signal(s) precisely that one has failed to digest or
wholly assimilate. If the subject fails to transcend the normal work of mourning the lost
other will become incorporated into the subject and continue to inhabit her deep inside
of the intrapsychic crypt. Indeed, the crypt is an apt metaphor as the ego comes to
contain and keep alive within itself the “cadaver” of the other. It is the crypt, which
functions as “the vault of a desire,” that is a literal form of melancholiac incorporation.

41
In normal or successful mourning the dead object is digested, then assimilated, into the
self. By contrast, in encryptment there is an enveloping within one’s boundaries of
another, an other , that remains undigested.
42

Within this Derridean paradigm, mourning is an affirmative incorporation of the lost
other, an internalization of the lost beloved who can never be fully assimilated. Through
the ingestion of the other, cannibalism participates in the fundamental “impossibility” of
mourning, in that the desire to incorporate the other within the self fundamentally
destroys its alterity or otherness, while at the same time the ingested other remains
elusive even from within the self.

We must cannibalize the other, and we must also fail.
43

Jules et Jim
41
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation , ed.
Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (Omaha: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988), 5758.
42
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation , ed.
Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (Omaha: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988), 57.
43
Deutscher, 188.
29

She had such eyes, opal eyes/ Which fascinated me, which fascinated me,/ And
there was her oval pale face/ Of a femme fatale who was fatal to me… We played
with life and lost.
44

Jules et Jim is both a profoundly melancholiac text and one that illuminates the
oftambiguous relationship between melancholy and cannibalism. A modernday
resurrection of Pygmalion—the titular characters fall in love with a piece of classical
statuary and its enigmatic smile, just as in Ovid’s Metamorphoses , and the rest evolves,
then devolves from there—it is also the story of those who desire to make one body out
of three. But what begins as the decadent indulgence of a deviant ménage slowly slides
into a vacuum of sentiment.

According to Truffaut’s own auteur theory, the director and his life is inextricable from
the work he produces. To this end the personal narrative of Truffaut, as well as the
circumstances of how this film came to be, functions as a kind of appropriately
melancholic frame for the story of Jules et Jim .

Alienated from his family since birth, the young Truffaut was born out of wedlock to a
mother who kept him a secret for quite some time. He never met his father and was
referred to simply as a “child born to an unknown father” on his birth records.

In spite
45
of being adopted by his mother’s new husband Roland—who gave him his surname—he
44
Henri Serre, Jules et Jim . DVD. Directed by Francois Truffaut. France, Cinedis, 1962.
45
“Francois Truffaut: French New Wave Director”, www.newwavefilm.com , February
2012
30

was never really accepted. Roland and his mother later conceived another child who
died shortly after childbirth. When the wanted child died and the unwanted one
survived, they came to resent him all the more.

He remained an outcast throughout his
46
adolescence, and was continually mistreated by his family, finding salvation largely
through escape of going to the cinema.

In spite of these early trials, Truffaut became a critic at Cahiers du Cinema where he
garnered a reputation as being particularly savage ; indeed, he was once deemed “The
Gravedigger of French Cinema” and was later banned altogether from The Cannes Film
Festival in 1958.

It was only after conceiving the cinematic auteur theory in his famous
47
“ Une Certaine Tendance du Cinema Francais ” that Truffaut decided to make films of
his own.

In 1955, while still working as a critic, Truffaut happened upon a copy of HenriPierre
Roche’s Jules et Jim in a used bookstore. He recalls being intrigued by the story on
many levels—not the least of which being that this was a semiautobiographical first
novel of a seventyfour year old who, as Truffaut phrased it, “…did not start to write ‘till
he could no longer live.”

The twentythree year old Truffaut struck up a
48
correspondence with Roche, and within a short time the young filmmaker—who had
46
Ibid.
47
As quoted in Sukhdev Sandhu, “Film as an act of Love”, www.newstatesman.com ,
April 2, 2009
48
As quoted in “Francois Truffaut: French New Wave Director”,
www.newwavefilm.com , February 2012
31

previously spoken out vociferously against the adaptation of literature into films—began
the adaptation process. Truffaut wrote to Roche with an invitation to visit Paris and a
photograph of Jeanne Moreau who had been cast in the role of Catherine, to which he
replied “… A heartfelt thanks for the photos of Jeanne Moreau… I like her… I’m glad
she likes [Catherine]. I hope to meet her one day.”

He died six days later.
49

Jules et Jim , in other words, is in some ways a film that shouldn’t have been made. It is a
film directed by someone who—according to the bourgeois strictures of the
moment—shouldn’t have been born, adapted from a book written by a man in his 80s
about life in his 20s, a film frequently visited by the spectre of friendship between its
director and its deceased author. Melancholy pervades the work, binds its creators and
characters alike, and lulls greyly over the decades it depicts.

If Truffaut’s The 400 Blows marked the beginning of the French New Wave movement
that, among other things, selfconsciously rejected traditional cinematic structure, then
Jules et Jim inverted the concerns—with adolescence and realism—of that seminal
earlier film. Jules et Jim comes to feel like a dream, or a hangover; an intensified
melancholy culminating in something that is barely real at all. Truffaut began the film
believing that it would be amusing, but, as he reflected, “along the way I noticed that
only sadness can save it.”
49
Using five copies of the novel sent to him by the author, Truffaut cut and pasted
sections of dialogue and description until he had a rough draft of the screenplay. He
wanted Roché to write more dialogue for the woman at the apex of the triangle, but the
ailing writer could only provide encouragement and advice about structure and action.
32

In some way, he preordained that emotional shift by situating the narrator as aged and at
the end of his life. One could argue that this is the nature of memory—situated in the
past but with littletono specific temporality. Rather than the full emotional force of a
fresh experience, as in The 400 Blows, Jules et Jim is in possession of the detached,
vaguely amused reflection of something that, albeit important, has been muted and
softened by time—the alwaysalready nostalgia of this narrative stakes it in the realm of
the melancholy. This is a film that sometimes seems to yearn for itself.

From its first act, Jules and Jim is effervescent, almost ethereal in its depiction of big
hearts and bigger passions, of what might be possible in relationships among friends and
lovers. The eponymous characters, the gregarious Jim and the shy Jules, meet and
swiftly develop a close friendship set against the backdrop of Belle Époque Paris, a time
figured here as one in which when the Bohemian lifestyle of a young Frenchman and a
young German is ideally attainable.
The new, fast friends flitter between bars and their modest dwellings, talking aesthetics
and romances deep into the night. Truffaut employs jump cuts and dizzying, breathless
montage to convey the excitement of a fresh friendship that hovers on the border of a
new love affair. After sparring and wrestling at a gym—a scene that playfully echoes
the famous homosocial contest at the center of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love —the
two rest while Jim reads to Jules a passage from his novelinprogress based on their
friendship. "They came to be known as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and soon,
33

unknown to them, their behavior led to, much rumor and speculation among the people
in their neighborhood."

[The analogy to Don Quixote is rather overdetermined, as the
50
tall, thin idealistic Quixote and short, worldweary Panza, the dreamer and the realist of
Miguel de Cervantes novel, set forth on a journey to describe the nonexistent girl of
Quixote’s dreams. Quixote imagines her to be the most beautiful of all women and is
prone to detail her appearance though he freely admits that he has never seen her —she is
an entirely fictional person for whom Quixote relentlessly fights.] The film never
discloses the precise content of that rumor and speculation , but here offers a tantalizing
allusion to the extent of the affective relationship between the two young men.
The sense of the story as recollection, already intimated by the narratival voiceover, is
doubled in Truffaut’s technique of highlighting moments that seem to particularly
endure in distant memory. The inclusion of footage from silent movies further generates
a feeling of detached reflection, and when juxtaposed against numerous splitsecond
freeze frames and sequences sunlit nearly to overexposure, this footage establishes the
period milieu.
51
50
Henri Serre, Jules et Jim . DVD. Directed by Francois Truffaut. France, Cinedis, 1962.
The analogy is rather overdetermined, as the tall, thin idealistic Quixote and short,
worldweary Panza, the dreamer and the realist of Miguel de Cervantes novel, set forth
on a journey to describe the nonexistent girl of Quixote’s dreams. Quixote imagines her
to be the most beautiful of all women and is prone to detail her appearance though he
freely admits that he has never seen her —she is an entirely fictional person for whom
Quixote relentlessly fights.
51
Carrie Rickey, “Jules and Jim,” Dissolve , no. 543 (February 2014).
https://thedissolve.com/reviews/543julesandjim/
34

And yet even the early scenes of Jules et Jim , effortless and carefree compared to what
follows, are imbued with a pervasive sense of melancholy. While the opening credits
feature the pair beaming amid a backdrop of circus clowns the gossamerthin veneer of
cheeriness is stained by a sense of the bereftness to come. Yes, Jules and Jim are
consumed by similar passions—language, poetry, literature, and so on—but their
relationship is less complimentary than it is symbiotic: seemingly they are but two
halves of one whole.
Catherine is introduced slyly, indirectly; when she arrives, she has already been situated
as an incarnation of an obscure and inanimate feminine archetype. When Jules’s friend
Albert shows the duo slides he has taken of ancient sculpture, they find themselves so
besotted by one image of a goddess that they travel —in custom made identical white
suits, no less— to the Adriatic sea to see “her” in person. They circle the statue in silence
for an hour, particularly its mouth, pursed and ambivalent, and do not speak of their
experience of it until they next day. “Had they ever met such a smile,” the film’s
voiceover inquired rhetorically. “Never. And if they met it? They’d follow it.”

As the
52
two friends, equally absorbed by the severe, intriguing bust, of the statue return to Paris,
the voiceover concludes, “Jules and Jim returned home full of this revelation. Paris took
them gently back in.”
53
52
Henri Serre, Jules et Jim . DVD. Directed by Francois Truffaut. France, Cinedis, 1962.
53
Ibid.
35

Catherine, the doppelganger of their beloved statue, finally appears eleven minutes into
the film. “Catherine, the French girl, had the smile of the statue on the island. Her nose,
mouth, chin and forehead bore the nobility of a province she personified as a child in a
religious celebration.”

The men are smitten at first sight.
54
“It started like a dream,” the viewer is told, though the introduction of Catherine and her
joie de vive seem to jolt Jules and Jim, and the film, out of sleep and into life rather than
the reverse. The young men’s satisfying, placid friendship soon becomes fixated on
Catherine as a kind of living embodiment of a vaguely contoured feminine ideal. When
Jim and Catherine get together, their first kiss “lasts all night,” and the very next
morning Catherine tells Jim that Jules should live with them. Though she is technically
with Jim she alternately solicits and provokes Jules’ interest. They settle into a life
together, less a ménage a trois than un amour a trois because Jim and Jules truly, if
possibly only platonically, love each other. Still, Catherine soon becomes their fulcrum.
With her beguiling free spirit, she is one who would personify Truffaut’s own ideal of
the “supreme woman”: “ fragile and fatale , intelligent and lively, funny and tragic, free
and haughty, a woman who followed the impulses of desire to the bitter end.”
55

She is always in motion, and when they are with her exciting things happen. On a whim,
the trio goes to the sea, rents a house by the beach wherein they pass the idle days of
summer. Catherine has pulled Jules and Jim out of smokefilled cafes and into the fresh
54
Ibid.
55
Annette Insdorf, Francois Truffaut , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978),
111.
36

air. They have a glorious time of it, on the whole, with a few minor incidents as when
Catherine grows extremely jealous when Jules and Jim don't pay any attention to her
because they are so engaged in a game of dominoes. But even when she is difficult to
please they remain awash in her glow and with enough attention lavished upon her she
never threatens to fall out of reach.

Willful and mercurial, she is always searching for the something just out of reach. She
wants to be possessed by an alpha male, everelusive at that, but only for a moment. Jim
aspires to be that alpha male but concerned about his own dignity and bogged down by
his fear of making mistakes. Jules’ quiet warmth cannot atone for his lack of masculinity
and mystery that Catherine desires. Both suffer the idea of having her all the while
knowing that “having” is possessive and patriarchal. When Catherine dresses like a man
and successfully passes, the narrator explains, “Catherine was proud of her successful
disguise. The men were moved, as if by a symbol they didn’t understand.” Later she
proclaims: “I don’t want to be understood.” Even the idea of being able to “have” her
comes to seem impossible.

One night the trio takes an evening stroll after watching a play. Catherine bemoans the
overly intellectual responses of her companions to the play—she liked the girl in the
play because “she wants to be free and live every moment of her life—but Jules and Jim
dismiss her reaction in favor of a belabored, masturbatory discussion on the
“metaphysics” of the drama. They go on and on. Finally she jumps off the bridge into
37

the Seine River. At last, they abandon their philosophical debates and rush after her,
impressed. Her capacity to intrigue them, even in the depths, eclipses all else. Every
word is a siren song. In this pas de trois , she leads and they follow.
Long before her subsequent, and fatal, plunge off of a bridge, an unmistakable sense of
trouble brews. George Delerue’s rueful musical score shows a shift from a celebration
of an era to an elegy for it. “Le Tourbillon” (“The Whirlpool”), in particular, evokes the
turbulence the trio experiences during those “whirlpool of days.”

“We met with a kiss,/ a hit, then a miss,/ and we parted,/ we went our own ways /in life’s
whirlpool of days/ around and around we go,/ together bound together bound.”
56

In these waters, the tides shift without warning.

Catherine’s volatile personality and swift declines into boredom begin to show
themselves more and more. During a foot race she jumps the gun, literally, on her two
men. “But I won,” “she smiles, partvixen, parttyrant. Such a reaction does little to
conceal a vicious appetite for victory. At her best she makes every small thing in the
world fascinating; at her worst she drains the world—their world—of all import and
seeks extreme thrills to fill the abyss.
56
Henri Serre, Jules et Jim . DVD. Directed by Francois Truffaut. France, Cinedis, 1962.
38

As the film progresses Jules, Jim and Catherine engage in a kind of waking melancholy,
wherein the objects of desire are both there and not there. A fog sweeps in, obscuring
and enveloping the threesome. What was once lighthearted spontaneity becomes
darkclouded capriciousness, and he sunlit beauty of the movie's first section seems
elegiac; the world the film portrays is so beautiful precisely because it is about to end.
Their love becomes their captor even as the shackles are imperceptible, yet, to the
captives. The threat of loss lingers.

The narrative voiceover serves as a reminder that this story is one of recollection, a
remembrance of things past. In the actual A Remembrance of Things Past Marcel
Proust’s narrator romances both the beautiful Gilberte Swann and the raven haired
Albertine Simonet. Like Roche, Proust’s narrator came to writing in the face of
imminent death. The latter grows variously bored and jealous of both women and finally
without both.

The allusion is unsubtle: Catherine cheats with Jules’ old friend Albert,
57
and Jim has a lover named Gilberte. In Proust, Julia Kristeva finds cannibalism and
melancholy intertwined and locates “a constant oscillation between melancholy and
joy,” invoking classical psychoanalysis’ notion of the melancholiac’s fixation at the
57
In 1949, the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine
the Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some
female characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the
feminine ending of the names of the Narrator's lovers—Albertine, Gilberte,
Andrée—and one has their masculine counterpart. This theory has become known as the
"transposition of sexes theory" in Proust criticism, which in turn has been challenged
in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick an d in "Proust's
Lesbianism" (1999) by Elisabeth Ladenson. Feminized forms of masculine names were
and are commonplace in French.
39

level of a primary cannibalism — in Proust sublimated to the other food, most notably the
petite madeline.
58

In 1914, World War I fits Jim into a French uniform and Jules into a German one. Jules
is suicidally content to be sent to the Russian Front because it alleviates his haunted
belief that he may unintentionally kill — or consume — Jim, an absurdity the film
purposefully countenances and credits. When the war ends, Jules returns to Catherine
in the countryside and after taking a circuitous trip through various sites of battles Jim
rejoins them. While the characters show little sign of aging (or any clear
acknowledgement of how much time has passed), they have endured something from
which they emerged changed. The ethos of turnitup, putiton feels lifetimes away,
never to return. Those lazy, languid days of youth and bohemian pleasure have expired.
While her wartime unfaithfulness is somehow no surprise or bother to either man, the
fear of losing Catherine becomes ambient among them. “Our happiness didn’t take and
58
In 1949, the critic Justin O'Brien published an article in the PMLA called "Albertine the
Ambiguous: Notes on Proust's Transposition of Sexes" which proposed that some female
characters are best understood as actually referring to young men. Strip off the feminine ending
of the names of the Narrator's lovers—Albertine, Gilberte, Andrée—and one has their masculine
counterpart. This theory has become known as the "transposition of sexes theory" in Proust
criticism, which in turn has been challenged in Epistemology of the Closet (1990) by Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick an d in "Proust's Lesbianism" (1999) by Elisabeth Ladenson. Feminized
forms of masculine names were and are commonplace in French.

40

we were left face to face,” she sighs, of Jules, to Jim.

A key song echoes this
59
resignation:
We got to know each other, and recognize each other,/ We lost touch with
each other, then all over again,/ We met again, we warmed each other
up,/ Then we left each other…
60
Their withdrawal from the world can be seen through the lens of Michel de Montaigne’s
description of the relationship between solitude, melancholy and selfobservation. “It
was a melancholic mood… then, when I discovered that I was completely empty and
destitute of other subject matters, I took myself as subject and object of study.”

But an
61
increased attention to the problems at hand, if that is their solution, does little to remedy
the problems.
The situation worsens and each begins to feel that the others are out of reach. For
Derrida, we are inevitably, invariably cannibalistic subjects, and so the other is always
already reduced to our interiorization of him or her. There is no difference between the
friends; the other is myself. “Who is the friend that I mourn? Mourning... allows ethical
reflection on one’s organization as a cannibal self who appropriates and internalizes the
other to the point where a loss of the friend is experienced as a loss to the self.”

In
62
melancholia as in mourning, it is essentially the work consisting of finishing with the
59
Henri Serre, Jules et Jim . DVD. Directed by Francois Truffaut. France, Cinedis, 1962.
60
Ibid.
61
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” in Reading About the World, Volume 2 , ed. Paul
Brians et al ( Pullman: Harcourt Brace Custom Books, 1998), 250.
62
Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship , trans. George Collins (London: Verso,
1997) 101.
41

object (by degrading it or declaring it dead) that will "strike dead" the dead and release
the subject. Neither can let Catherine go, nor can she relinquish them, nor can anyone
bring anyone closer.

Teresa De Lauretis has characterized the position of women within narrative cinema as
"mythical obstacle[s], monster[s] of landscape," and lying somewhere between the gaze
and the image.

Catherine, who carries a bottle of sulfuric acid “for the eyes of men
63
who tell lies,” seems a kind of Medusa sprung to life, though her monstrous female
power and demand to be regarded differently by the male gaze initially entice rather than
repel Jules and Jim. Linda Williams asserts that woman becomes monstrous when she
looks, but contrary to the classical myth, in which Medusa’s gaze was most deadly after
her head was separated from her body, Catherine is both seduction and resistance to
being seduced.

As Melanie Klein suggests in Cultures of the Death Drive , “[t]he Freudian notion of
melancholia is close to an open wound, a black hole, an abyss of dereliction. There is no
real object loss in melancholia, no mourning… the subject mimics real mourning for the
phantasmic possession of the object and out of its own cannibalistic devoration.
Melancholia is the most impossible, unlikely, and risky stage of love, the stage of loving
cannibalistic ingestion.”

This interminable state offers an illusory sense of comfort for
64
63
Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics , Cinema (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press 1984), 141.
64
Esther SanchezPardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist
Melancholia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 52.
42

the subject but ultimately comfort cedes to an irreparable disconnect with reality. She
continues: “In melancholia, it is impossible to leave the past behind. Withdrawal and
grief do not end, since they have become a way of retaining forever in phantasy what has
long since been lost in reality.”
65

If one conceptualizes Jules et Jim as a kind of slow death of its characters, cinema itself
can also be encountered as a slow death, or a documentation thereof. In “Loving a
Disappearing Image,” Laura Marks departs from Freudian notions of melancholia and
mourning, and describes cinema as a whole as a process of observable decay, citing
Paolo Cherchi Usai’s insight that “[c]inema is a history born of an absence. Since, if all
moving images were present in their initial state, there would be no history of cinema,
history can only explain why these images had disappeared…”

Not only is cinematic
66
history a process of witnessing a slow and prolonged death, “the ways film and tapes
physically break down is... to witness its slow death.” Marks locates this notion bodily
and viscerally in a section entitled “Cinema’s Dying Body,” in which she highlights the
alienation one naturally experiences from one’s own body over the passage of time.
Marks makes an implicit comparison between the “slow death” of oneself and the “slow
death” of the film as one watches it: “...I suggest that identification is a bodily
relationship with the screen; thus when we witness a disappearing image we may
65
Ibid., 53.
66
Ibid. 103.
43

respond with a sense of our own disappearance. Cinema disappears as we watch, and
indeed as we do not watch…”
67

There is an air of melancholy wisdom about life within Jules et Jim . And yet does
anyone ever get anywhere in the film? As one reviewer observed, “[a]ll three characters
are so deeply infatuated with not only her/his own idealized concepts of being but also
each other’s bohemianfueled impression of intellectual freedom…”

As characters,
68
Jules and Jim exist as little more than opaque, obsequious archetypes, foredoomed
because Catherine will never be content with their devotion, and can leave only ghosts in
her wake.

Kristeva incorporates a classical element into melancholy, mirroring, and a classical
figure, Narcissus. The melancholiac thus conceived is a wounded Narcissus who is
bound to his suffering. Here she situates that classical figure in a broad literary tradition
in which the melancholiac derives pleasure in reflecting on himself in his predicament;
“melancholy, it is the joy of being sad,” as Victor Hugo has it. Kristeva is invested in
Freud’s conception of melancholy as an aborted grieving process, wherein it isn’t just
the world, but also the self that is impoverished, and the melancholiac is unconsciously a
cannibal who internally has devoured the love object, which he refused to separate
himself from. However, more than Freud or even Abraham and Torok, she emphasizes a
melancholy that possesses no drive to exact revenge on the love object that, by its
67
Ibid.
68
Chuck Rudolph, “Jules and Jim.” Slant Magazine . May 30, 2005.
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/julesandjim
44

disappearance, betrayed and wounded the “I.” For Kristeva, depression is the most
archaic expression of a narcissistic wound that can neither be named nor symbolized.
Thus it becomes a replacement for the lost object. In this reading, she suggests that
“...suicide is not a camouflaged act of war but rather a reunification with melancholy and
beyond it with an impossible love, never reached, always somewhere else. Such is the
privilege of death.”
69

While the title of the film declines to name the woman who most occupies its
imagination, Catherine is both the center of its melancholic gravity and a figure whose
destabilizing momentum seems to rupture the binary conception of melancholy as it has
been traced heretofore. Her climactic expression of violence actually destabilizes the
filmic text in which it transpires, articulating an emergent cynicism, however unviable,
around the representation of melancholy itself—it is something like a suicide bombing at
the city center of sentimentality.
Catherine has been casually and rather ahistorically described as "protofeminist" by
some critics, and by the 1970’s even Truffaut worried that she would be "recuperated by
feminism, independence, a woman's choice," while he once more declined to name her:
69
Julia Kristeva “On the Melancholic Imaginary” in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and
Literature, Ed. Shlomith RimmonKenan (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1987), 177.
45

"[w]ithout doubt, the young woman of Jules and Jim wants to live in the same manner as
a man but it is only a particularity of her character and not a feminist attitude."
70
But at what cost? She seems monstrously lacking in empathy or even basic recognition
of damage, let alone her agency therein. With her at the helm circumstantial logic comes
to trump the broader scene of relationality, Jules professes to Jim “It’s when she seems
happy that I worry...”. Her ability to be enchanted and enchanting seems to have been
lost, as if she has emptied herself of all content and has made all but made herself into a
formality of sexual relationality as such. While this is not the same as using promiscuity
for probable cause, to be sure, but as the film progresses she seems to have less and less
of a mooring principle for others. And they are up all night, so to speak, waiting for her:
she who has become the punctuation to the syntax and content of their living sentences,
for, of and to one another.
The positioning of Catherine as some manner of quasifeminist has a clear logic: her first
suicidal gesture, fraught with foreshadowing, occurs at the very moment of the film's
most heightened, even cartoonish, misogyny. As the trio depart a performance of
August Strindberg's "Miss Julie," a play embroiled in debates around early twentieth
century feminism and culminating in what is presumably the titular character's suicide
over her violation of contemporary bourgeois custom, Jules proclaims without
70
This is a recurrent trope, but see, for instance, John Powers, "On Jules and Jim."
February 4, 2014. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/369onjulesandjim .
Francois Truffaut, Interviews . Ed., Ronald Bergin. University Press of Mississippi.
(Jackson: 2008). XIV.
46

provocation that marriage necessarily revolves around the fidelity of the wife. And as he
cites from memory a string of quips from Baudelaire concerning the inherent impurity
and moral incontinence of women, Catherine strolls to the bridgeedge of the Seine and
silently drops herself feetfirst into its blackened waters. Feminist theorist Germaine
Greer arrived at Truffaut’s concern by another path, perhaps Kristeva’s, disavowing
Catherine and her last act as "the final atrocious extravagance of an indulged and
destructive narcissist."
71
That Catherine has frequently been interpreted as illegible as her sphinxlike smile
seems a critical opening; how exactly might the imagined incoherence of Catherine’s
refutation—of monogamy, marriage, motherhood, and, ultimately, mortality— vex
politicizing and pathologizing alike? Does the cipher that is Catherine exemplify the
melancholiac as cannibal; is extermination simply consumption without end? Is
Catherine a dialectical incarnation of an archetype “between madness and a general
lucidity , ” as Benjamin phrases it, and “between darkness and sublime illumination”?
Something other than an answer presents itself as the film nears its fateful dive, as Jim
relays a long anecdote on the futility of epistolary seduction in the context of the carnage
of the Great War to Jules and Antonio, a wounded vet with whom Catherine is carrying
on an affair. She enters the scene and remarks, coldly, that Jules, too, had once sent her
71
Germaine Greer, “Three’s a Crowd.” The Guardian . May 23, 2008.
www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/24/francoistruffaut.worldcinema

47

romantic love letters from the frontline—an interjection that abruptly concludes the
film's sole dialogue on the war that structured it, and one in which fifteen million had
just met death and an empire had fallen.

The depiction of Catherine's curious interruption, though, does not accent its frivolity,
but rather underlines the dramatic inversion of affective scale that pervades the film; the
three concede her point, or at least her presence. The real world of shed flesh and blood
is, astonishingly, here overwhelmed by the dream fugue of a melancholic ménage à
trois , and seems to suggest something awful and possibly true about the radically
foreshortened possibilities of human sentiment. Just before Catherine’s entrance, Jules
declares to Albert and Jim, the lot of whom are blithe to Catherine’s uncontainable and
obliterating dissent from the regime of classical melancholy in which they endure,
"[w]hat's appalling about war is that it deprives man of his own individual battle."

48





Trouble Every Day : The Cannibal as Melancholiac

49

“It is not a question of any particular kiss but rather that the kiss, in
itself, opens on to the bite, and the taste of blood. And consequently it is
another known coupling, that of Eros and Thanatos: not in a dialectic
of opposites, but in a mutual excitation and exaggeration, each asking
the other to go further, to go all the way to the end, to get completely
lost.”
JeanLuc Nancy, “Icon of Fury”

“There is no end to it. Trouble every day.”
JeanLuc Nancy, “Icon of Fury”

From one pole of melancholy to another: from the interiorized forms of cannibalism, an
autocannibalism that functions as a kind of perpetual premourning in Jules et Jim to a
film that presents literal cannibal subjects killing and devouring the ones they love in
Trouble Every Day . As Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson posit, ”There is a deep
connection between melancholy and hunger for another food, a feverish, insatiable
hunger like that of a frenetic weasel sucking eggs.”

In Trouble Every Day melancholy
72
shows itself as precisely this “feverish, insatiable hunger.” It is a disease of a mental and
physical nature, and one in which inner suffering is projected out onto the world. The
world is there to be consumed, to be feasted upon.

Far beyond the universal cannibalism that psychoanalysis tells us leaves its imprint on
all relationality, in Trouble Every Day the primordial “eating” breaks free from the
72
Daniel Birnbaum & Anders Olsson, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy
and Cannibalism , trans. Brian Manning Delaney (New York: Sternberg Press, 2008), 11.
50

unconscious. The repressed is expressed. Again and again the body is reduced to a fleshy
container of base desires, of blood and guts sutured over, thinly and terribly, with a skin
that is all too easy to break.

Yet for director Claire Denis, the film is rumination on love above all else. “It’s actually
a love story. It’s about desire and how close the kiss is to the bite…we just took this to a
new frontier.”

This “new frontier”, as she deems it, foregrounds the tenuous matters
73
that separate one body from another and the alwaysalready wound(ed) surfaces of
which we are made. Yes, sex slides into killing, but with the viscera comes romance and
moments of real tenderness.

Denis’ cannibals are monsters and victims at the same time. They are predators to others
and preyed upon by themselves. Trouble Every Day reminds of the violent impossibility
of attaining the other, about a primal frustration, the fact that no matter how intimate we
become with another person—an other —the other will always remain foreign to us just
as we will to them. For even they can’t get “at” the other; put differently, they get both
too close and not close enough. In this light the film is a struggle, an exploration of baser
animalistic urges and the human need for emotional closeness, a beautiful and grotesque
and all too human quest for closeness. In Trouble Every Day even—especially—the
cannibals are melancholy.

73
Intense Intimacy: The Cinema of Claire Denis , 5.
51

JeanLuc Nancy’s rigorous reading of the film hovers around and around one single
image: a bite mark branded on the shoulder of the young newlywed June. For Nancy this
“icon of fury”, marks the passage from kissing to devouring, encapsulates the haunting
forces at play in this film.

The kiss is not only a “metonymic representation of sex” but
74
also “it opens onto the bite and the taste of blood.”

Skin gnawed to the point of
75
bleeding. Though it is but a fleeting image in the film it occupies a pivotal space as a
bridge from self to other. The mark itself is a mark, a mark of the journey from the
inside to the outside and back again.
76

In order to relate Trouble Every Day , a film so very different from Jules et Jim on all
registers, to the same phenomenonmelancholy—we must explore behind that mark. As
we will see in Trouble Every Day cannibalism leads to melancholy and the roots of
melancholy as a disease link up with cannibalism as a disease.

Ancient conceptions of melancholy as a malady can be seen as some of the forces at play
in Trouble Every Day . As Daniel Birnbaum and Anders Olsson explain, much of ancient
medicine concerned itself with the four humors i.e., blood, yellow bile, black bile, and
phlegm, and the interface between them (these four humors are the correspond to the
74
JeanLuc Nancy, “Icon of Fury: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day ”, trans. Douglas
Morrey. FilmPhilosophy , vol. 12, no.1, 1.
75
JeanLuc Nancy, “Icon of Fury: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day ”, trans. Douglas
Morrey, FilmPhilosophy , vol. 12, no.1, 1.
76
JeanLuc Nancy, “Icon of Fury” in FilmPhilosophy , 12.1, 2001, 6364.
52

four elements, earth water fire and air, as well as to the four seasons).

If the balance
77
among the four humors, also known as fluids, became disturbed, pathological conditions
both mental and physical begin to manifest.

The disturbed conditions resulting from an
78
excess of phlegm, yellow bile, and blood were, the phlegmatic, the choleric, and the
sanguine, respectively. Black bile, widely considered to be a debased form of yellow bile
to begin with, in excess amounts would lead to what were known as the “diseases of the
soul”: lugubriousness, depression, and melancholy.

In its most malignant form, too
79
much black bile would rive a person to madness and death.

For centuries black bile was thought of as almost entirely—if not entirely—damaging.
But beginning with Platonic philosophy a new dimension of melancholia comes to the
fore:

The darkness of melancholy not only means despair and death, but also
carries the seed of rebirth the melancholiac is torn between the
destructive forces of the night and a higher form of clarity…on the one
hand, gloominess and sluggishness, but under favorable conditions also
clear sightedness and ingenuity.
80

Thus we see the beginnings of the double nature of melancholy, as explored in the
previous chapter and this one, has an ancient origin. And this ambivalence that existed
in the ancient concept of melancholy is sharpened even further in the renaissance. In
77
Daniel Birnbaum & Anders Olsson, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy
and Cannibalism , trans. Brian Manning Delaney (New York: Sternberg Press, 2008), 16.
78
This would seem to be the opposite of the disgust/desire toggle in Sianne Ngai’s Ugly
Feelings that will be further explored in the subsequent chapter.
79
Birnbaum & Olsson, 28.
80
Ibid., 29.
53

1631’s The Optick Glasse of Humors , a presentation of medicine through the lens of
philosophy, Thomas Walkington contends that “the melancholiac has access to the light
of genius, but also to animal forces that threaten to eclipse all reason.”

It is at once the
81
most noble of the humors—able to bring the mind into the highest form of
harmony—and a threat to the balance in the body and the psyche.

He teeters on a
82
narrow ridge between two abysses...

Moving into Trouble Every Day we see this
83
teetering between two abysses all too clearly.

Trouble Every Day disorients from the outset. The first few minutes bombard the viewer
with: femme fatale; a body lying amidst a field of weeds; a van hastily parked by the
side of an empty road; young newlyweds on an airplane; the cold, dark and strange.
Jason Bellamy likens the first few minutes of Trouble Every Day to the smatterings of
dismembered signifiers of Hollywood found in David Lynch’s films.

A similar affect
84
surrounds the image of the kiss that opens the film:

Such is…a quotation of cinematic imagery: the plane, the honeymoon,
the languid suave eroticism of a longhaul cabin at night. Yet the
quotation keeps its distance: outside, in the night, the aeroplane is carried
in the cold altitude and the noise of the engines, there is a threat
81
Thomas Walkington, The Optick Glasse of Humors . 1631.
82
In the Problemata Aristotle contends that through melancholy some men have become
divine beings, foretelling the future..while others have become poets…and he says
further that all men who have been distinguished in any branch of knowledge have
generally been melancholiacs.

83
Birnbaum & Olsson, 30.
84
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard, “The Conversations: Trouble Every Day ” Slant
Magazine ,Oct, 2009.
54

somewhere. The question already creeps in: what is this kiss? What does
it want?
85

This “quotation of cinematic imagery” distances the viewer in a kind of protracted
reeling in and casting out. Somewhere out there, or in here, is a threat. Not only “what is
this kiss [and] what does it want?” but also what is a kiss, who are these people, and
what do any of them want?

Denis’ narrative is ever so loosely constructed—accordingly, we are left with
suggestions, or allusions, rather than concrete answers, about so many things. Most
notably: what is the disease that transformed our protagonists Coré (Beatrice Dalle) and
Shane (Vincent Gallo) into cannibals? Piece by piece a plausible if very incomplete
version of the truth unfolds: years ago, a kind of science fictionesque experiment years
ago somewhere in the tropics went terribly wrong. The dismembered signifiers, or at
least some of them, come into focus a bit further into the film: Shane, one half of the
newlywed couple in the opening sequence, has brought his new bride June on what has
the pretense of a honeymoon but is actually a continued quest to cure his disease. His
exlover, Coré, appears less interested in a cure: she lures a horny truck driver off the
road home only to devour him before being fetched by her own husband, a doctor, who
seems all too familiar with this task.

85
Ibid.
55

Trouble Every Day returns, again and again, to the scientists in their lab. These scientists
are probing a lifeless brain, which up close and personal in their hands, resembles a cold
hunk of meat.

This virus attacked their brains. Not the heart. The brain. The film’s
86
hyper attention to the brain attacks our notions that attraction and love are ruled by the
heart. As Antonin Artaud asserts, “There is nothing in fact more ignobly useless and
superfluous than the organ called the heart, which is the vilest means that one could have
invented for pumping life into me.”

Perhaps the same chilly logic applies to Trouble
87
Every Day ’s depiction of sexuality: here, the brain governs everything, even that which
is normally accorded fantastical, romantic illusions of the “heart “, the “soul.”

The effect of this ‘brain, not heart’ dichotomy is echoed by the biological reductivism
implied to be at the core of cannibalism. The disease that turns Coré and Shane into
killers doesn't impose something foreign on them; rather, it simply strips their behavior
to a bare, uncontrollable impulse. Their malady is depicted in such a way as to remind
us that sexuality is instinctive, an outgrowth of biology. Damage the brain and
everything changes—they are similar to their old selves, maybe (though we’ll never
know) but never the same. In a kind of reversal of what JeanLuc Nancy suggests in
L’Intrus —“ (my heart) was becoming a stranger to me…a gradual slippage was
separating me from myself… I was no longer in me…henceforth intruding, it must be
extruded”—the brain, the organ that helms the most basic and unromantic bodily
86
The role of close ups will be explored later in this chapter.
87
Quoted in JeanLuc Nancy, L’Intrus 84 , no. 56, (1948), 103. L’Intrus is also a 2004
feature film by Claire Denis based on this piece of writing by Nancy.
56

functions also controls this thing called desire.

On the one hand their cannibalism is a
88
primal urge brought to life, on the other hand it is nothing more than the effect of a virus.

8990

While Trouble Every Day is a film about the spectacular, it is presented in a most
unspectacular manner. Certainly the restrained soundtrack from The Tindersticks,
longtime collaborators with Denis, helps to set this tone of restraint. Bellamy compares
the soundtrack to that of a film by Denis’ acknowledged mentor, Jim Jarmusch: “Like
Neil Young's spacious guitar and organ solos for Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man ,
atmospherically filling in some white space with gauzy smears of sound, buttressing the
overall mood of the piece.”

It moves with the image rather than against it and comes to
91
function as a ballad, sad and smooth, for the visual.

This is a film full of silence(s). The dialogue, always minimal, is often in English. The
title, too. Even the visual grotesqueries—the shocking outbursts of violenceare shown
with delicacy. These outbursts are something out of a monster movie but here they taken
on an entirely different tone. And the sterile laboratories, sparse hotel rooms and
dilapidated/eroding suburban houses of Trouble Every Day are unstylized and largely
forgettable spaces. As Kristi Mitsuda suggests in “Too Close for Comfort”, the film is
88
Ibid.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid.
91
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard, “The Conversations: Trouble Every Day ” Slant
Magazine ,Oct, 2009.
57

“A recasting of the monster mythos pitched not in the key of the supernatural but
integrated into a sensuous naturalism…”.

Of course the cinematography of this “tone
92
poem” is the work of Agnes Varda.

As with the soundtrack, the effect of the visual is
93
one of melancholy.

This interplay, between the aural and the visual, is powerful. Rather than aligning the
viewer with the fears of the “victims”, the film invites us to experience its horrors
through the urges of the characters inflicting the damage. Even as she unleashes the most
exaggerated versions of the terrible instincts buried deep within us all, Denis is patient
and sensitive and delicate with everyone, even—especially —her cannibals.

A broader sense of fear is at the heart of Trouble Every Day : not only the fear of being
stalked and killed by a predator, but also the fear of hurting those we love, the fear of
losing control, fears stemming from anxiety about sexuality and relationships.

Eve
94
Sedgwick’s “aesthetic of pleasurable fear” bears relevance here.

The simultaneous
95
inspiration of fear and desire, and the kind of unlocatable terror of either but
especiallyperhapsin the synthesis applies to representations of the cannibal.

92
Kristi Mitsuda, “Too Close for Comfort” Reverse Shot , 2009.
93
Claire Denis and JeanPol Fargeau, Trouble Every Day , DVD. Directed by Claire
Denis. France: Rezo Films, 2001.
94
This toggle between fear and desire—e.g., the cannibal terrorizes us in our will to be
eaten —will be explored in a later section.
95
Quoted in Diana Fuss, (ed). Inside Out . (New York: Routledge, 1991), 21.

58

Within this film we are not reduced to a singular, monolithic representation of a
cannibal. Her two “monsters”, one male and one female predator, are not the same. Coré
is a sexy archetype, a horrific exaggeration of the unapproachable woman who both
appeals to and intimidates men. But while she is a sexual predator, thus occupying a role
generally reserved for men, she is also—much more than Shane—reduced to, and
controlled by, her sexual urges. Her husband Leo locks her in her room because if he
doesn't Coré is going to go in search of sex; she simply cannot help herself. Sexuality
always threatens to run out of control: here it does.

Perhaps the most disturbing scene comes when Coré relishes in gruesomely tearing apart
a teenage boy she lures into her makeshift cage: “…the unknowing teenager tears at the
barricade Coré’s husband has constructed to keep her from doing harm, the pair hungrily
kissing and licking at one another through the wooden beams. Its desperate human
sexual desire turned completely horrific.”

The slow and steady tension mounting
96
furthers the feeling that we are watching a predator and prey, a terrible synthesis of two
beings in their own world, his terrorfilled cries only to be answered by death.

The distinction between fear and anxiety comes into play many times including the
above scene. The term fear, whose metapsychological status remains uncertain, was
used by Freud, in contrast to anxiety, to refer to the reaction to some real danger. In
several works Freud discussed the semantic relationship between the
96
Kristi Mitsuda, “Too Close for Comfort” Reverse Shot , 2009.
59

terms Angst (anxiety), Furcht (apprehension, fear), and Schreck (fright). For Freud the
distinction between anxiety and fear relates primarily to its object, a distinction found in
his earliest writings. In an article from 1895, which discusses the distinguishing
characteristics of phobias and obsessions, he differentiates phobias "according to the
object of the fear," while anxiety refers to the emotional state experienced by the subject,
without reference to a specific object Similarly, in 1916, in his Introduction to
Psychoanalysis Freud, referring to the use of these terms in popular speech, indicated
that "anxiety is related to a state with no direct allusion to an object, while in fear the
person's attention is precisely focused on the object."

The conceptual terrains of fear
97
and desire emerge as at once obvious and contradictory for my general idea that the
trope of cannibalism is a way to understand the connection between sexuality and
consumption in film.

In this sense Trouble Every Day is about addiction, albeit addiction of the deadliest sort.
It isn’t that deep inside Coré covets people with such ferocity that she wants to devour
98
them. She will eat anyone. Her appetite is borne of an illness, a need for human flesh as
sustenance rather than the other way around. Coré must feed on men, which involves
having sex with men, which involves killing them. Not a fetish or an emotional impulse
but on a chemically induced biological urge (against which civilized manners hardly
97
Sigmund Freud, Introduction to Psychoanalysis,
98

60

stand a chance). “ Disease eviscerates ethics.” Her diseased body is the victim of a coup
that eviscerated any potential for intervening morality.

For Coré, sex is killing; for Shane, killing is sex. Unlike Coré, Shane has some level of
willpower: he struggles—can struggle—with his addiction in a way that she cannot. One
scene finds Shane watching his wife take a bath. His gaze lingers, lovingly, until June
shifts positions allowing Shane a glimpse of her anatomy. That mere glimpse unlocks his
cannibal desires and suddenly he’s been turned him into a drug addict desperate for a fix:
“Just as a razor blade is never just a razor blade to the cocaine addict, for Shane, an
exposed crotch is never just an exposed crotch.”

  The specter of violence hidden
99
behind that screen of gentility can’t be ignored.

The above scene returns us to the ancient origins of melancholy: Most melancholiacs are
lustful, so the theories go, and this is certainly the case in Trouble Every Day : “there is a
welldocumented relationship between the at once intoxicated and melancholic god of
wine to Aphrodite, the goddess of love.”

Furthermore there is a close relation of wine
100
and the melancholic temperament to erotic desire: ”wine in large quantities manifestly
produces in men much the same characteristics which we attribute to the melancholic
state…as with alcohol consumption, small amounts produce mild symptoms that give
way to bigger ones and, in fact, the excess symptoms contradicts the mild symptoms.”
101
99
Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard, “The Conversations: Trouble Every Day ” Slant
Magazine ,Oct, 2009.
100
Birnbaum & Olsson,19.
101
Ibid.
61

Drunk in love, as it were, Shane knows he must escape his wife or he’ll kill her;
alternatively, he must save both of them from his murderous impulses. Terrifying as they
are, the horrors of love and identification have a long history of documentation in
psychoanalysis, among other realms. At the base of every identification lurks a
murderous wish, a subject’s desire to cannibalize the other who inhabits the place it
longs to occupy.

Furthermore, identifications are always limited and finite; they must
102
be continually renewed and reenacted, for the egos appetite is furious and without end.
As Eli Sagan writes in Citizens and Cannibals: The French Revolution, the Struggle for
Modernity, and the Origins of Ideological Terror, “…love is ultimately unsatisfying for
the reason that it craves but fails to recreate the absolute intimacy between subject and
object which we experienced in infancy. Moreover, in the intensity of its thwarted
desire, love begins to blur with aggression, the desire to completely consume the other in
order to achieve such a union.”

Cannibalism itself has been seen as a confusion of
103
desire and hatred.

Sagan tells us that in Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary the entry
104
for ‘antropofages’ follows immediately after ‘amour’; of this, he narrates, “…Voltaire
coyly states, “I have spoken of love. It is hard to move from people who kill each other
to people who eat one another– knowing full well that it is not hard at all.”
105

102
Diana Fuss, (ed). Inside Out . (New York: Routledge, 1991), 77.
103
Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form . (New York: Harper
& Row, 1974), 81.
104
Ibid., 81.
105
Ibid., 86.
62

The serial process of murder and consumption can always already be understood as a
kind of cannibalism and one that is written on, and in, the body throughout Trouble
Every Day .

JeanLuc Nancy reminds us of the imperative as well as the destructive
106
nature of touch:

This truth is singularly monstrous, like all truths: it is at once the truth of
the most tender kiss, and of the most horrible carnage, it is tenderness and
cruelty in a terrible chimera, exchanging roles, as though it were a
question of fresh meat (tender flesh) and the splendor of blood.
107

Sexuality always necessitates an intrusion of an other, another, the other. Denis seems
to nod at this by making the body itself a kind of protagonist of the film. Everyone and
everything is distilled down to flesh and bone, and the ambivalence—or even
reluctance—of the cannibal does not render him any less haunting. Whether an attack is
paradigmatic, deferred, or never actually occurs, every surface in the film seems all too
breakable.

But the skin is a surface that most frequently and violently becomes a point of entre.
The truth of a body appears in its dismembering, in its tearing apart of (neatly arranged)
organs and limbs, when the blood bursts out of the skin.

Our body—even our
108
brain—is food. To return to the scientists: even in the laboratory the diseased brain looks
like nothing so much as “another chunk of fresh meat.” As Ian James puts it, even ‘if we
106
JeanLuc Nancy, “Icon of Fury” in FilmPhilosophy , 12.1, 2001, 63.
107
Ibid., 64.
108
Ibid.
63

open them up, dissect, Xray, scan, or hugely magnify [bodies] we are simply creating
another exterior surface or relation of contactseparation of sense.’”

He continues:
109
”There is nothing about a body to figure out.”

In other words, the secret is that there is
110
no secret.

The melancholy comes from the longing that permeates this film. In a kind of inverse of
Jules et Jim , we see a great deal of feasting, of indulgence, of visceral, bodily
consumption, but there isn’t any sense of satisfaction or closeness in the afterglow.

Shane begins to turn his attention to other women, most notably a chambermaid working
at the hotel where he and June are staying. He watches her. He finds a bed where she
napped during her break and he caresses it, slowly and steadily. Later we watch her
preparing to leave work, changing out of her uniform and standing at a sink washing her
feet. This is a small moment of the mundane made huge, and hugely erotic, from the
cinematography of Agnes Godard. We are frequently in Shane’s point of view especially
when he tails her from behind as she pushes her squeaking cart down the hall, like a
hamster caught in a wheel she can neither see nor touch. He obsesses over her hair, that
part of her that is already dead.

We are kept at a distance, just as in the opening scene, for the duration of the film. Over
and over again the camera comes close, to someone’s body to the point of profound
109
James, 43.
110
James, 4243.
64

discomfort…but the close ups get us anywhere but close. Rather, it is as if they take us
farther away for an awareness of the impossibility of closeness. Neither Gallo’s blue
eyes nor Dalle’s of green give away much to the others in the film. The chilled
melancholy of the gaze haunts.

At once fragile and terrifying, perhaps due to the odd pairing of his imposing physique
and diminutive voice, Vincent Gallo as Shane palpably struggles against an
everincreasing appetite for flesh.

He lingers on the subway. He skulks around dark
111
corners. He usually gets caught. Unable to consummate his marriage for fear of literally
devouring his bride, Shane is starving. Not so much hungry as he is insatiable, here
Shane recalls the early theories of the nature of melancholy mentioned at this chapter’s
outset: t he melancholiac has difficulty with the intake of food.

On the metro he
112
slithers up to smell a woman only to be spotted by another and flee. Later he stares at
someone applying lipstick until she notices and speeds off into the night. Almost
instinctively they can feel the danger.

One scene finds Coré where she stares with fascination at a lit match and the dancing
flame brings her face into focus. The camera pauses as though she’s willingly posed for
our occasion. As she delights in the flicker of the flame, the darkness in her eyes
becomes illuminated. The film seems to beg the question: what violence hides behind
the eyes of the people we know and love? Denis is subverting the conventional thinking
111
Ibid.
112
Daniel Birnbaum & Anders Olsson, 28.
65

about the closeup, the expectation that such intimacy with the camera allows the
audience to get closer to a character; indeed, “maybe eyes aren't the windows to
anything.”
113

A look into Coré's eyes shows only the illusion of life and activity, the lively sparkle of a
flame reflected in this woman's otherwise impenetrable eyes. Intolerable, unseeable,
eyes full of blood..in a scene where the only thing to see is “unbearable, invisible excess.
” We look, hoping to glimpse an inside, but there is only outside. In their violent
defiance, closeups conceal rather than reveal.
114

We can extrapolate that Shane has become increasingly distant from his wife, as the film
goes on. The distance has been growing, that June’s hope that marriage will cure him is
futile. Their loneliness is palpable. June's confusion and pain when she waits out in the
rain, desperate for some sign of her husband, are terribly palpable. All she wants is an
explanation but all she gets are “comforting words like “Are you frightened?” and “I
would never hurt you.”

(Were scarier words ever uttered??)
115

Meanwhile the apparently loyalty of the marriage between Coré and Léo is one of the
sweetly sad notes of this film. The scene where Léo comes up behind Coré and begins
113
Morrey, 29.
114
Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969),
212.
115
Claire Denis and JeanPol Fargeau, Trouble Every Day , DVD. Directed by Claire
Denis. France: Rezo Films, 2001.
66

kissing and caressing her is quite a traditional love scene up until Coré’s arousal cedes to
bloodlust; he has to stop the party before it starts, so to speak, but even so their
interactions are tender and erotic. The two of them quietly share a kind of
establishingofagency without obscuring accountability and an affection that sutures
over all the rest, at least for now.

There is provocation and recognition but no exploitation of guilt inhering for the other.
Some byzantine deferrals notwithstanding, he is able to see the broader context, and to
not get angry, as if to recognize how even the concept of anger serves to shield both the
dynamics from which it springs and the more nuanced aggressions that thrive within the
body of his beloved. Oddly enough the exchanges Coré and Léo have of killing and
cleaning call to mind a Sikh wedding wherein the ceremony involves a ritual of the bride
and groom feeding each other, because that is the one thing that a couple will always do
for each other if they make an agreement about getting old together. We know he loves
her and will go on recognizing her long after the her of yore has gone away. No “change
of heart” comes with the change of brain. (Also: he’s a professor).

This pervasive sadness is why, on some level, all of these characters are sympathetic.
Even Coré, who seems to have been totally consumed by the urges that have much more
recently begun to affect Shane. Denis sets this up by ensuring that we don't see her
murders, only the aftermaths thereof, until quite a ways into the film. And the clean up
67

process is , presented in such poetic imagery that even the sight of a murder being
cleaned up is beautiful: the dark blood glistening in the moonlight, dripping heavily off
stalks of tall grass; Léo lovingly sponging the blood off his wife's naked torso. Even as
Léo towels off his wife's naked body postcoitalhomocide. He remains devoted to her
even in the face of monstrosity. He is not—or at least not only —sickened by the sick.

There is something stirring about Coré, to whom we can never get close in any way. On
one level, Denis presents her as a kind of beautifully menacing Dracula. But there's also
something almost childlike and serene in her, as well as that overwhelming sadness. We
also get Coré sitting alone in an empty field, curled up into a ball, staring emptily into
the night. An overwhelming sadness keeps percolating up to the surface from beneath
her chilly façade, like the flash/flicker of rejection that flashes across her face when Léo
cuts short some foreplay when she becomes too aroused. He's doing it out of
selfpreservation, knowing he's about to trigger her murderous impulses, but we can see
the hurt and rejection running over her. As one critic puts it: “Just because she's a killer
doesn't mean she's not…a woman.”
116

Meanwhile a similar moment of quiet heartbreak occurs when Shane interrupts sex with
June by going to the bathroom to masturbate instead, violently and joylessly, while June
lies alone. No words, just walls, she cries a library of tears.

116
Kristi Mitsuda, “Too Close for Comfort” Reverse Shot , 2009, 4.
68

What is our reward for suffering through all this? It seems the film offers little closure
for audience or characters. We bounce around Paris, we hurt the ones we love. Trouble
Every Day is “structured by the sensory rather than the story…devoid of most expository
elements and inclined towards an atmospheric impressionism.”

The elliptical narrative
117
twists and turns in an endlessness . After Shane kills he is desperate for an escape, a
wayout from the other that rages inside him. But everything is closed – all the spaces
here, really—from the very beginning to the very end. There is no escape. As the title
reminds us, there is trouble every day.

There is also no closure in another sense of the word. JeanLuc Nancy points out that
both the French pellicule (and the Spanish pelicula) mean both film and skin, membrane.
(As will be discussed later the cinematic gaze, itself, then, is penetration.)

Denis
118
fosters this penetration, or so she claims: “I’m not saying this as a joke, capturing bodies
on film is the only thing that interests me.”

And yet there is not exactly a penetration
119
of the world by the image or a wound that won’t close.
120

On the one hand this is a film that films the skin, that films almost nothing but skin. ‘in
extreme closeups, in sections and expanses, with its textures, blemishes and bristles,
with its hollows and bumps’, that seems almost to confuse the skin with a screen, and the
117
Mitsuda, 9.
118
Nancy, 15.
119
Mitsuda, 7.
120
Nancy, 701.
69

screen with skin.

On the other hand the skin is always vulnerable to intrusion. The skin
121
bursts, ruptures, on the surface and underneath. [The noun ‘le baiser’ means a kiss; the
colloquial verb ‘baiser’, to fuck. The French ‘pellicle’ means both film and skin].

If the wound becomes a key image in the work of both Nancy and Denis,
it is perhaps because it marks with even greater acuity the untenable limit
between inside and outside: the wound opens the body to the outside, but
is also an opening in, an infolding or invagination.
122

And what do we find, after all of this rooting around, after all of the violation foisted
upon bodies in Trouble Every Day ? To what does the “icon of fury” open? There is no
resolution, neither ecstasy nor appeasement: only distraction. A clenching in fits and
starts’. ‘The truth of a body appears in its dismembering; fucking is only a means to
pleasure in so far as this pleasure executes something other than pleasure: a mystery.”
123
Love bites.
124

Obviously here there is no divide between violence and sex. But does this hyperbolic
example excavate or obscure the violence always already in sex? As Sontag writes, “All
images that display the violence of an attractive body are, to a certain degree,
pornographic. But images of the repulsive can also allure. (They are) also, for many, the
121
Nancy, 60.
122
Douglas Morrey, “Open Wounds: Body and Image in JeanLuc Nancy and Claire
Denis”, FilmPhilosophy , vol. 12, no.1, 10.

123
Nancy, 60.
124
Ibid.
70

wish to see something gruesome.”

Later she recounts a story of George Bataille, kept
125
a photograph taken in China in 1910 of a prisoner undergoing “the death of a hundred
cuts” on his desk, where he could look at it every day. “This photograph had a decisive
role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same
time ecstatic and intolerable. To contemplate this image, according to Bataille, is both a
mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge.
126

Trouble Every Day shows a different kind of , one rendered through a visualization of
consuming and being consumed. In a way Trouble Every Day functions as a
spatialization of digestion that is in itself both nauseating and nourishing and one that
psychoanalysis, even, denies as process. In psychoanalysis, you eat, you shit, you fuck.
There is no process, only product. In this logic, p orn is but the tedious process of
fucking; the money shot confirms that something invisible about penetration at the very
least results in culmination. Here the process rises to the fore, which is especially rare in
films that deal with sex and sexual identity, where product is usually the one and only
goal. This movie shows the struggles of sexuality by taking the ‘inside’ and turning it
‘outside.’ the film works as a visualization of consuming and being consumed. It
variously expands and defers the jouissance of penetration and ingestion and creates a
new kind of gaze—one that is not merely visual or an object itself, but an excavation of
and a dwelling upon viewership itself.
125
Susan Sontag, “The Image World” in Regarding the Pain of Others . (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 95.
126
Sontag, 98.
71

For Gayle Rubin, a sadomasochist (and a lesbian), these different formulations of the
process of viewing make sense, in the context of this film; that is, if your experiences of
love and sex involve pain, perhaps you need a different rubric altogether.

In 1984’s
127
"Thinking Sex" she theorizes these issues in and around porn. Her search is to define a
critique that avoids forging a union with puritan ideals that so often appear as sexist and
heterosexist. In her discussion of porn, she acknowledges that the industry as it exists is
"hardly a feminist utopia" and "reflects the sexism that exists in the society as a whole.”

128

The contemporary horror film recalls cinema not only to its violent historical beginnings
but to the abject materiality of its very form.

Film technology always bears traces of
129
this early traumatic event, as Noel Burch reminds us, and the grotesque and the
aggressive content in that sense mirror the cinematic form, even though what is usually
the violence of the cut and the intimacy of the close up is reversed here in Trouble Every
Day . Still, the film remains human in its inhumane moments.
As Douglas Morrey says: “In a kind of inverse of Plato’s Cave, which is understood to
project a world outside itself, the cinema does not reflect an outside (itself), but,
127
See Gayle Rubin's discussion of consent; “mutuality and integrity.”
128
Martine Beugnet, “Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression”
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 162.

129
Diana Fuss, Identification Papers . (New York: Routledge, 1995), 88.

72

according to Nancy, opens the inside upon itself. In a paradoxical sense, then, matter,
bodies, the world for Nancy are always already open because they are that which opens
space (to itself), and yet there can be no entering in to this open as though from outside
it. If all things coexist within the open, then their relation can only be one of mutual
exteriority inside.”

Through different means but a similar spirit, Jonathan Crary, sheds
130
light on the problems of representation. In Techniques of the Observer, he takes a
nonconventional approach and considers the problem of visuality through an analysis
and deconstruction of the historical construct of the spectator. He writes: “The corporal
subjectivity of the observer, which was a priori excluded from the camera obscura,
suddenly becomes the site on which an observer is possible. The human body, in all its
contingency and specificity, generates "the spectrum of another color," and thus
becomes the active producer of optical experience.”

Crary goes on to insist that the
131
problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power. Using the above
theories, if we can understand the degree to which visuality itself is constructed, we may
be able to see the constructions of otherness

Coré finds a lucidity in her kills (she is both a sexual predator and a woman reduced to
her sexual urges thus occupying a male and female spot all at once). In his ambivalence
Shane’s killings become ghosted by a kind of double exposure; the contrast between is
also, becomes also, a contrast within. The virus emptied them and then filled them back
130
Morrey, 28.
131
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century . (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 4.
73

up again, as they do with their victims. Perhaps the worst victim of all is June. We see in
her face how this culmination of their new union is emotionally devastating for her (and,
differently, for Shane). Another match potentially made in hell. There is no context of
the days before. What informed their union, what broader gestures led to a proposal, a
marriage, and now this. In one sex scene we see her or them lunging towards an
impulsive and crisisbased intimacy before it all goes to hell. I believe that you love me,
one can almost hear her think. And she seems to know that he is not running away from
her but towards something else, a symptom of a disease from which he desperately
wishes to be cured. (For what it’s worth, Shane fights against gaslighting her: he knows
being out of control about his attachments doesn’t excuse them) But to be the unchosen
over and over again is hard, and conflating this local, temporal, and what looks to be
crassly repetitive pain hardly proves comforting.
The chasm between characters is most poignant in the final scene between Shane and
June. When they embrace, and we wonder if June saw the truth about her husband, we
also wonder if their relationship could ever get to the same place as Coré and Léo's
relationship. The ambiguous final scene—Shane kills the chambermaid, finally; he finds
June; they embrace; they set out on the drive home—is again full of close ups and again
crushing in its lack of clarity. We are left alone to wonder “Did she or didn’t she see the
single drop of another woman’s blood streaming down the shower curtain?”
132

132
Claire Denis and JeanPol Fargeau, Trouble Every Day , DVD. Directed by Claire
Denis. France: Rezo Films, 2001.
74

As per the “quotation of this cinematic imagery” with which this chapter, and the film at
hand began, the rest of Trouble Every Day keeps us at a distance. This film explores, in
multiple senses of the word, the strange and mysterious forces alive in the human brain,
the instincts that organize what we conceive of as our free will.

In a way Denis aggregates that which is often disaggregated. Her monsters are also her
victims. Her cannibals are melancholy. Returning to melancholia, again: for Kant, it is a
question of the precise dosage. It is possible to experience “melancholia generosa”, i.e.,
a condition in which one displays the positive energies of melancholy without falling
into the depths of insanity. This yin and yang, of a sort, is expressed in many different
ways throughout the film: the loving devotion of our two cannibals to their beloveds, and
vice versa, being one example. So often our bodies are separate from who we are as
people. In using hunger as a form of artistic expression, Denis and her actors reinforce
the Cartesian split between mind and body, promoting an almost reckless and
pathological relationship to one’s own corporeal being.

According to Stuart Hall, while a moral repugnance toward the ingestion of one human
by another radically undermines the human privilege of the eater, it also underlines the
humanness of the observer. But from another perspective, by designating the eating of
one body by another to be cannibalism we acknowledge the likeness between subject
and object. In this way the act obliterates the difference between self and the eaten
other, or the eating other, making one body of the two. In this way cannibalism
75

acknowledges and performs sameness, on the level of epistemology however it
constructs difference. Are the characters here mirror images of one another? Leo and
Core, Shane and June, the cannibal and his/her prey?

Trouble Every Day may be a film full of horrors (to wit: a critic from Le Monde who
dedicated his review of the film to the two women who passed out during the screening
at Cannes) but it is not, really, a horror film.

The bite mark adorning June’s shoulder, this “icon of fury”, is a scarlet letter of
melancholy. What would seem to be a sign that she has been penetrated—in some, any
sense of the word—is more like a constant reminder that she has not been, will not be.
Kissing, fucking, spit, cum: the fluids that squirt out of the body in sex and death (sex
that is death) are not to be hers.

In the end Trouble Every Day is a linkage of tales, a tissue of connections chronicling
the death drive to death. Is there not something sublime, something wonderfully alive in
these throes of dying, as seen here, at the same time? Kisses that kill and killers that
kiss. They are one another’s conversation though the medium is hardly the message in
such cases.

The limits of melancholy are obviously a shared cannibalism, a sacrifice shared in
togetherness or love. This cannibalism is not a malignant, archaic remains living on in
76

the human psyche: it is the ground without which no love affair is complete. Sexual
activity is never divorced from nourishment, in one form or another; as Derrida puts it,
“to love without wanting to devour must surely be anorexic.”

To love is to eat but for
133
fun: a difference between metaphoric and real eating that the melancholic doesn’t feel.
He eats the lost object without digesting his food. Is it possible to transfer the idea of a
different kind of food to other art forms and, further, to culture at large? The following
chapter will move beyond the limits of melancholy to the cannibalism(s) of and in our
appetites.

133
Morrey, 24.
77

Outsides, In; Insides, Out

78

Human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth .
George Bataille

As per the previous chapter, the melancholiacascannibal has problems distinguishing
between loving and eating; he internalizes the lost object so endlessly, so completely that
he identifies with it. Put differently, he has difficulty discerning between what is
“outside” and what is “inside” of himself.

This chapter will center around insides and outsides (and the relationship between the
two in various states of cannibalism). Foregrounding this interplay allows a move
beyond the limits of melancholy to appetites and of ingestion and digestion themselves;
that is, moving more closely into consumption and identity followed by a critical
examination of eating itself.

In order to address how and why cannibalism continues to have import in today’s world,
this chapter will trace the history of its figuration during the period of its inception, the
colonial era. As Franz Fanon details in his seminal Black Skin, White Masks , skins, veils
and other forms of outer conduct come to confer moral categories of interiority for
Europeans in the colonial era.

That these categories are taken up by postcolonial
134
scholars such as Fanon—among many others—hardly comes as a surprise. For as much
as we have demonized the figure of the cannibal over the past five hundred plus years,
134
For more on Fanon and the inside/outside dialectic, see “Semiotics and the Language
of Emancipation” in Sandoval, 81116.
79

we have simultaneously manipulated him to serve us in countless ways for our own
purposes across this time. In this sense the cannibals were always mutually constitutive
rather than purely projective.

Close attention to where the cannibal emerges theoretically in today’s world reveals the
gradual widening, and whitening, of the category. The conflation between
homosexuality and cannibalism—both seen as a hunger for/of the forbidden—borne in
the colonial era takes on new faces and spaces in the modern era. Indeed, the carnality
of taking in that which is outside of the self can stand in for libidinal appetites otherwise
too “obscene” to be addressed.

As in Jules et Jim , desires themselves can assume a cannibalistic form. That is, the
remembering and dismembering of the cannibal, the coming tougher and falling apart,
is but a more extreme example of what is what is always at play with an other, a
simultaneous and contradictory urge to love the other but also to take in, and kill, that
other.

As in Trouble Every Day , a mere virus is enough to rewrite us at a fundamental level. If
we move more closely into critical eating studies here we will see how eating both
produces and erases the self. Our bodies never stop composing or decomposing, being
born or dying, configuring itself in the assumption of an identity and dividing itself into
80

zones of desire, pleasure and pain. But how did the cannibal come home? How did we
all become cannibals?

As previously mentioned, whether or not cannibalism describes an extant or an alleged
social custom, and whether or not that custom is predicated upon literal anthropophagy,
i.e., the consumption of one human being by another, the discourses themselves are no
less historical and far more rich. Here, we necessarily but briefly turn to the beginning
of these discourses in order to metabolize their shifts over time.

“Here are found those people which all of the other islands of the Indies fear: they eat
human flesh,” Columbus wrote in his “Letter to the Sovereigns 4 March 1493” in
reference to the inhabitants of the island of Caribo.

Columbus’ arrival at the term of
135
course occurs alongside his arrival in the future colonies. He first refers to the Carib
Indians as “canibales” on November 23rd, 1492, and over the course of the next month,
he interchangeably refers to Caribs as “canibales,” “canimas,” and “caribes.”

By
136
December 26th, the words cannibal and carib had, for Columbus, become synonymous.

Unsurprisingly, the trope of cannibalism progresses from rare and rumored incident to
major ethical problem in correspondence with the evolution from narratives of travel and
135
Christopher Columbus, “Letter to the Sovereigns of 4 March 1493.” Quoted in
Kimberle S. Lopez, “Eros and Colonization: Homosexual Colonial Desire and the
Gendered Rhetoric of Conquest in Herminio Martinez’s “Diario Maldito de Nuno
Guzman.” Chasqui, Vol. 30, No. 1, May 2001.
136
Ibid.
81

commerce to the discourse of settler colonialism. As Europeans continued to expand
their domain across the globe through colonialism, so too did the term cannibalism
become instilled in the European consciousness. In the sixteenth century, Pope Innocent
IV declared cannibalism a sin requiring forceful punishment by Christians, and Queen
Isabella of Spain actually decreed that Spanish colonists could only legally enslave
natives who were cannibals, endowing the allegation with clear economic motive for
colonists.

Despite the pervasive acceptance of Columbus’ cannibal thesis, there were dissenters.
Perhaps the most famous counternarrative of this era is Michel Eyquiem de
Montaigne’s 1562 essay “On Cannibals.” While he doesn’t directly questioning the
accuracy of Columbus’ lurid “discovery,’ Montaigne problematizes the
civilized/uncivilized binary framing Columbus’ accounts of the cannibal. Instead,
prefiguring Rousseau, he depicts the supposed cannibals of the Carib as existing in a
“golden age” because of their unity with nature and freedom from the binds of
civilization. For Montaigne, what is natural is good and he suggests that the natives of
the new world possess all of "the true, most useful, and natural virtues and properties are
alive and vigorous."

He falls short of condoning anthropophagy but he defends the act
137
of it while condemning his own society with the notion “moral barbarism,” which for
137
Quoted in Michael PalenciaRoth, “The Cannibal Law of 1503,” in Early Images of
the Americas: Transfer and Invention , eds Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis.
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993).
82

him constitutes nothing more than the unfamiliar: “One calls barbarism whatever he is
not accustomed to.”
138

In a sense, Montaigne laid the groundwork for the concept of the “innocent cannibal”
and, more broadly, for a contemporary reexamination of the cannibal figure. He sheds
light on the fact that from these earliest moments of usage in Spanish colonialism its
application occupied a metaphorical position in relation to the alien folkways of the
immanently colonized indigenous. The cannibal is a privileged signifier of the
primitive, the barbarian, and is a justification for colonial hegemony. A postcolonial
politics, then, must recuperate this othering while untangling its metaphorical and
metonymic web.

This recuperative project is of course predicated on Homi Bhabba’s contention that
colonial discourse fundamentally hinges upon the “fixity” of “sign[s] of
cultural/historical/racial difference” in the “ideological construction of otherness.”

The
139
cannibal can be productively imagined here as a Spivakian “native informant”—a blank,
or a tabula raza for the projections of the colonizer—who is both “needed and
138
quoted in Michael PalenciaRoth, “The Cannibal Law of 1503,” in Early Images of
the Americas: Transfer and Invention , eds Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis.
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993).
139
Homi K. Bhabba, “The Other Question: the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse” in
Visual Culture: The Reader . (London: Sage Publications, 1999).
83

foreclosed” at particular moments.

In Reclaiming Sodom, Jonathan Goldberg proceeds
140
from this point in centering colonial expansion on the designation of “unnatural acts” as
a means of naturalizing its own ideology.

He orders the European body by figuring the
141
inhuman and the unhuman as others; the narratival voice of contact is human, but must
invariably crash against the shores of the in/unhuman in the course of colonial
encounters.
142

In Imperial Eyes , Mary Louise Pratt theorizes spaces of colonial contact in which those
disjoined by literal and metaphorical continents suddenly come into confrontation with
one another. The historiography of this encounter has traditionally relied on the concept
of a moveable frontier that teleologically advances toward settler domination; most
influentially, Frederick Jackson Turner subsumed the genocide of the indigenous of the
North American West into a “frontier thesis” in which the scenario of that encounter is
invariable and inevitable. Pratt’s terminological intervention recenters the role of
exchange in “contact zones,” however highly contested, in a way that can help us
reconsider the role of the figuration of the cannibal in these places and spaces. In
particular, this conceptual perspective undermines the pseudoobjective detachment of
colonial reportage while foregrounding the circumstances of the cultural exchange in
which cannibalism was discursively produced.
140
For more on colonial/postcolonial time and the cannibal relevance, see Johannes
Fabian, Time and the Other . Guari Viswanathan, Enchantment , and Carla Freccero,
Alternative Modernities .
141
Jonathan Goldberg. Reclaiming Sodom . (London: Routledge, 1994), 6.
142
Kim Hall, Things of Darkness . (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 19.
84

Here, Kim Hall’s work unpacking the origins of the categorical designations in colonial
empire offers a point of entry into examining the need for mutual “ordering” of Africa
and England as a protooppression that precedes colonialism by centuries. “Descriptions
of dark and light, rather than being mere indications of Elizabethan beauty standards or
markers of moral categories,” Hall observes, “became in the early modern period the
conduit through which the English began to formulate the notions of ‘self’ and ‘other’ so
well known in [current] Anglo American racial discourses.”
143

These modes of differentiation, which take on new scope and significance in the colonial
era, also begin to compound disciplinary regimes. In particular, Hall highlights the way
in which the “admonition to leave off ‘sodomy, idolatry, and cannibalism’ became for
Cortes a formulaic expression he would utter upon approaching each new community, as
part of a ritual of performance of taking possession.”

The long historical linkage
144
between homosexuality and cannibalism is rooted in the colonial era, and this twinning
of primal sins became specific rhetorical and legal justifications for enslavement, as well
as those practices that must be forsaken in order to enter civilization. Goldberg, in
particular, connects Cortes’ order to cease sodomy—without evidence that homosexual
acts were integral to the culture—to condemnations of specious nightmares of rampant
cannibalism in occupied colonies.

143
Ibid., 2.
144
Ibid., 19.
85

In Eros and Colonization , Kimberle Lopez unravels the denselywoven threads
entwining colonialism and the figure of cannibalism. She suggests that, at times,
imperial power’s fascination with cannibalism was the first introduction of the
phenomenon to the colonized, and she gives multiple accounts of anthropologists
who have been mistaken for cannibals. For example, Gannath Obeyesekere
writes of seeing young children burst into sobs at the mere sight of him; “I soon
realized I was being used as a bogey man by mothers to secure their children into
obedience.”

“Whereas westerners attribute anthropophagy to other cultures,”
145
Lopez observes, this dichotomy has sometimes been reversed: “European
imperialism has also been conflated with cannibalism in the eyes of some
colonized cultures.”

Moreover, she contends, there are numerous accounts of
146
imperialism itself as the very thing that first informed the soontobecolonized
of cannibalism.

Lopez further details the connections between sodomy and
147
cannibalism by aligning both under the rubric of “a quintessential emblem of
otherness” designated as unnatural by Europeans.

A turn to Michel Foucault moves us towards more contemporary conceptions of
homosexuality. Foucault was paramount in tracing the development of the homosexual
as an identity category/classification did not emerge until the latter part of the nineteenth
145
Kimberle S. Lopez, “Eros and Colonization: Homosexual Colonial Desire and the
Gendered Rhetoric of Conquest in Herminio Martinez’s “Diario Maldito de Nuno
Guzman.” Chasqui, Vol. 30, No. 1, May 2001.
146
Ibid., 35.
147
For more on this see Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form .
86

century.

And it was not until this notion of homosexuality was cemented that the
148
notion of the heterosexual/heterosexuality congealed in approximately the 1880s.

Prior
149
to this emergence homosexuality was considered to be a “vice” equally tempting to all.

Lopez links cannibalism and homosexuality as things acceptable under extraordinary
circumstances through introduction of the concept of “situational homosexuality.” Just
as cannibalism is somewhat understandable, or forgivable, or at least tolerated in
extraordinary situations like a time of starvation, “situational homosexuality” occupies a
similar space in all male environments. Contemporary examples include relations
among incarcerated males. The example to which she refers is Sodomy and the Pirate
Tradition by Burg is “shipyard sodomy.”
150

As sin, sodomy was an act “committed” or not “committed,” an act (and inclination) for
which one was “guilty” or “not guilty,” ashamed or unashamed. As sin, the act of
sodomy might be taught by “bad” example, but no one distinguished between “acquired”
sodomy and “congenital.” A sodomitical impulse was an inherent potential of all fallen
male descendants of Eve and Adam. Given the right contexta plunge into the depths of
sexism, mainly“hierarchical homosexuality”, wherein the penetration of one man by
another stands in for confirmation of masculinity par excellence (the operational logic
148
Quoted in Lopez, 17.
149
Ibid.
150
Lopez continues, “...more often than not their idea of a declaration of love was a knife
held to the throat.” Love hurts.
87

here being that men are more of a challenge to ensnare while women are easier and
certainly weaker).
151152

Lopez also delves into the multiple contradictions associated with/excavated by this
concept and its role in colonial desire.

Whereas Robert Young’s theory of colonial
153
desire explores the inherent ambivalence of the colonial situation, focusing on the
simultaneous attraction and repulsion felt by the colonizer toward the colonized. The
concept of the homosocial illuminates a fundamental contradiction at the heart of
western culture; “patriarchy,” as Lopez frames it, “encourages homoerotic desire
through male bonding while simultaneously discouraging the expression of this desire in
homosexual behavior.”

She adds another type of paradox and works to unite two
154
categories of what she deems “paradoxical desire” : “…(to unite) these two categories of
paradoxical desire—colonial desire as simultaneous attraction and repulsion, and the
homosocial as coexistent homoeroticism and homophobia—in a theory of homosocial
colonial desire.”

This paradox gets at a fundamental aspect of cannibalism:
155
ambivalence. In Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form , Eli Sagan
151
Lopez, 29.
152
As Diana Fuss suggests in Inside Out , “... Leo Bersani, in an ambitious expose of anal
politics, reminds us that even ‘in cultures that do not regard sexual relations between
men as unnatural or sinful, the line is drawn at ‘passive’ anal sex.”
153
As seen from Robert Young’s work the concepts of colonial desire and the
homosocial have been developed separately within current postcolonial theory and
gender theory, respectively, and both point to contradictions within the Western notion
of desire.
154
Lopez, 30.
155
Ibid.
88

elaborates upon the importance of examining the ambivalent cannibal, “…desire can be
readily translated into its opposite..when we try to analyze these phenomena we get
closer to understanding a quality inherent in all cannibalism: ambivalence. The desire to
eat someone and the desire to be eaten by someone lie so close together in the psyche
that we cannot express the one without having to deal, at the same time, with the other.”

156

Accusations of homosexuality against groups of “othered” people occurred throughout
the twentieth century, most notably with Jews in and around the time of the Holocaust.
Here the accusations were combined with (and often conflated with) accusations of
cannibalism, two “master tropes” in the “western imaginary.”

“Andrade’s reference to ‘transforming the taboo into a totem’
implies…‘legitimating anthropophagy by transforming the taboo of the
primeval father’s patricide (the father being in this case the European
colonizer) into the acceptable eating (by the colonized) of the totemized
animal that symbolically replaced the primeval father.”

Brazilian modernism has resisted the colonial narrative for the better part of the
twentieth century. Oswald de Andrade, one of the seminal figures of the movement and
the author of 1922’s ‘Cannibalist Movement’ constituted the initial step in the
reappropriation of the cannibal as a symbol, wherein Andrade employed the metaphor of
ingestion as a means to advocate for the creation of a more honest, reflective national
culture for his country. In response to the malevolent European production of Brazil as
156
Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (New York: Harper &
Row, 1974), 121.
89

“The Land of the Cannibals”, Andrade advocates a metaphorical transformation of the
Brazilian people into cannibals. He writes, “I am only interested in what’s not
mine…only cannibalism unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.”

Brazil’s
157
cannibalism, as per Andrade’s outlining of the term, consists of devouring and
assimilating European influence and presence. Through this inversion of the
colonizer/colonized, he removed the ‘barbarism’ of his people and simultaneously
exposed the barbarism within the colonial project itself.

Almost concurrently, European Dadaism was discovering the figure of the cannibal as a
useful metaphor for its own mission. In Andrade’s philosophy, cannibalism becomes “a
metaphor for an elitist cultural strategy of identity construction based on a diagnostic of
the social evils plaguing an undeveloped, colonized country desperately in need of
becoming modern in terms of aesthetics, politics and social reform.”

Dadaism likewise
158
utitlized the figure of cannibalism as a means to indict prevailing European culture.

In 1920, Dadist Francis Picabia delivered his ‘Manifeste Cannibal Dada’ in Paris:

You are all indicted; stand up! Stand up as you would for
the Marseillaise or God Save the King ....
Dada alone does not smell: it is nothing, nothing, nothing.

It is like your hopes: nothing.
like your paradise: nothing.
like your idols: nothing.
157
Oswald de Andrade. “Cannibalist Movement” in New Latin American Cinema . Ed.
Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 5759.
158
As quoted in Andrade, 98.
90

like your politicians: nothing.
like your heroes: nothing.
like your artists: nothing.
like your religions: nothing.
Hiss, shout, kick my teeth in, so what? I shall still tell you that you are
halfwits. In three months my friends and I will be selling you our
pictures for a few francs.
159

Later that year Picabia publishes the manifesto and, with poet and pamphleteer Tristan
Tzara, cofounds The Review Cannibale, in which they develop this theme and
persistently deny the distinction between the eater and the eaten. As Tomoko Aoyama
evocatively observes, “Dadaism thus is not only edible and lickable itself but also eats
up and licks up everything that is not itself.”
160

By midcentury, Andrade’s seminal conception of postcolonial modernity had congealed
in Brazilian modernismo, a key concept of which is the radical reevaluation of the notion
of the cannibal as a cultural norm. Recognizing that the historical condition for
discursively producing cannibalism is the institution of racial hierarchies through the
figuration of the other as irredeemable, William Arens argues that “ modernismo is
neither a simple imitation of European Dadaism nor a nostalgic return to nature, but a
strong resistance to being devoured by the hegemonic discourse of the colonizers by
devouring it instead.” The filmic wing of this movement tended to recognize both the
nutritive quality of European culture as well as the potential for a transformative strategy
of postcolonial appropriation.
159
Manifeste cannibale dada by Francis Picabia, read at the Dada soirée at the Théâtre
de la Maison de l'Oeuvre, Paris, 27 March 1920.
160
Tomoko Aoyama, Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature , 99.
91

Andrade’s reclamation of national identity through the metaphor of cannibalism was
revived in the 1960s with the Brazilian Cinema Novo.

Cinema Novo arose during a
161
particularly turbulent period in Brazil; in 1964, and again in 1968, military coups
deposed democratic administrations, and each time newlyinstalled juntas produced
harsher regimes of repression.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, filmmakers like Glauber
162
Rocha had committed themselves to the cultivation of a national cinema. Here they took
inspiration not only from Andrade but also from Frantz Fanon’s 1961 The Wretched of
the Earth, in which Fanon analyzes the psychological repercussions of colonialism on
the colonized and suggests the necessity of creating a new national culture. Fanon’s
argument that this new culture should reflect larger libratory struggles, for instance,
directly inspired Rocha’s famous “An Esthetic of Hunger.” Written in 1965, “An
Esthetic of Hunger” outlines the goals of Cinema Novo and the importance of
representing hunger and misery so that these concepts can be intellectually understood,
in context, by those who are literally subjected to them. He writes, “Here lies the tragic
originality of Cinema Novo for the world cinema: our originality is our hunger… and,
mostly, he does not understand where this hunger comes from.”
163

A broader cinematic examination of this “hunger” and its origins began shortly after the
161
Randal Johnson and Robert Stam, eds., Brazilian Cinema (Austin: University of
Texas, 1988), 82.
162
Zuzanna M. Pick, The New Latin American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas,
1993), 126.
163
Glauber Rocha, “An Esthetic of Hunger,” in New Latin American Cinema . Ed.
Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 5961.
92

1968 military coup, when Cinema Novo entered its socalled “cannibalisttropicalist”
phase.

In How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman , ( Como era gostoso o meu frances ), a
164
prime example of the tropes explored in the cannibalisttropicalist phase, Pereira dos
Santos fashions a critique of French colonialism through literalizing the metaphorical
cannibalism advocated by Rocha et al.

Santos’ film takes place in the picturesque
165
village Paraty and is the story of a Frenchman who has been captured and sentenced to
death by a tribe of Tupinamba Indians. In a fitting reappropriation of the way the French
overlooked the specificity of Brazilian citizens, as well as their national culture, this
character only referred to as “the Frenchman” or “the tasty Frenchman.”

Prior to his
166
execution, he lives among the Indians for eight months and these eight months are
chronicled in the film. Although the narratorturnedcaptive has a long history in
colonial literature, the cinematic techniques of How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman
reanimate this trope.

Santos’ camera is in perpetual oscillation between different
167
points of view; this movement, as Richard Pena phrases it, “enables the film to stress and
expand the space between the ‘documented’ acts and their explanations, while exposing
the falseness of the ‘official history.’”

Put differently, the struggles of the colonized
168
are shown by taking the ‘inside’ and turning it ‘outside.’

164
Johnson and Stam, 37.
165
Pereira dos Santos, director, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman .
166
Johnson and Stam, 45.
167
For more on the intersection of cinema and displacement, see Hamid Naficy. An
Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
168
Richard Pena, “How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman” in Brazilian Cinema , (Austin:
University of Texas, 1988)193.
93

The struggle for narrative control at the center of the film as a micro example of the
macro struggle for (and of) language itself. In other words, language is not necessarily
adequate to interpret and reflect the struggles that Andrade, Fanon, and Rocha
understand as imperative. Furthermore, the retelling of traumatic events risks
minimizing their atrocities. Theorists like Jonathan Crary, who considers the problem of
visuality through a deconstruction of the historical construct of the spectator, remind us
that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power. Santos
demonstrates this by deliberately reducing the film’s dramatic conclusion to
words—words, furthermore, that appear on the screen at the end of the film. Only a
postscript reveals that the Tupinamba were exterminated shortly after killing and eating
their captive (the metaphor and literal consuming/being consumed thusly take another
turn). Through his reveal of the highly orchestrated act that is narrativization, Santos
ruptures the connection between subject and spectator normally affirmed by classical
cinema.

Employing the language of film to reclaim and reimagine national histories was a novel
and invigorating form of articulation for Rocha and his contemporaries.

By rendering
169
a “cannibal countermemory,” Oswald recasts the lens through which revolutionary
responses to colonization might be interpreted. They developed an aesthetic
“remembering, a putting together of what was torn asunder” in which a “history of
169
For more on Brazilian cinema and its development, see Michael Chanan. “Cinema in
Latin America” in The Oxford History of World Cinema . (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1996).
94

exploitation is estranged even as it is exploited,” and where “individual trauma” is
transformed “into the inspiring recollective force that unites a community.” What
colonial hegemonies might dismiss as mimetic contrarily voices itself as mastication,
digestion, and regeneration. And this revolutionary impulse is triumphally
consummated in the cannibal’s ultimate indigestion and bodily rejection of colonial
power.

The character of Caliban from The Tempest is an especially rich focal point for
complications associated with the representation, textually and visually, of the cannibal.
And t he latterday appropriation of Caliban by anticolonial and postcolonial diasporic
thinkers links the early Spanish colonial usage to Franco and Anglophone
understandings of both the primitive and the insurgent.

Caliban, the inhuman son of Sycorax “not honour’d with a human shape,” is, as a
racialized figure and a figure of cannibalism, as famously controversial as the racial
politics of Othello . Caliban is an "Abhor'd slave" simply because he has given up his
selfsovereignty in a tautological echo of the cannibal as the slave who resists slavery ;
he is a figure of cannibalism but not a cannibal, functioning as one without being the
other.

The Tempest is marked by ambiguity, in part that stemming from the juxtaposition
between Ariel and Caliban, both of whom are natives of the island where Prospero and
95

his compatriots have been shipwrecked, and who can be thought of in terms of contrary
forms of Montaigne’s cannibals. While convivial Ariel maintains his dignity and
relative liberty by serving Prospero willingly, brutish Caliban maintains his through his
refusal of obsequity. When Prospero to honor his promise of emancipation, Prospero
merely reminds him of the state of barbarity from which he has been “saved.” As Ariel
concedes to Prospero, he also assumes the form of a sea nymph invisible to all but
Prospero and thus enacts a nearcomplete erasure of self. When Caliban is ordered
about, however, he slurs Prospero in his newlyacquired tongue, and his verbal acuity
renders him recognizable and yet redoubles his otherness, his incontinent
monstrousness.

Recalling Jonathan Crary’s insistence that the problems of vision are inseparable from
the operation of social power, Jonathan Goldberg points out that “Caliban is a character
who according to the stage direction is a character who is ‘not there’ for the island is
uninhabited.”

Caliban does not require literal cannibalism, as the expansiveness of his
170
“abhor’dness” mirrors the vague net of Montaigne’s moral barbarism. It is his
rapaciousness, his combination of a lack of selfsovereignty and an uncanny mastery of
the English language, for one, that makes him monstrous. In her novel Written on the
Body , Jeanette Winterson’s narrator invokes Caliban while meditating on the limits of
language in the expression of desire: “You taught me language and my profit on’t is/ I
know how to curse. The red plague rid you/ For learning me your language.”

Later,
171
170
Goldberg, 101.
171
Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body . (New York: Vintage, 1994), 9.
96

when the narrator considers the supposed “monstrous[ness]” — a term she repeats thrice
— of articulating forbidden want, she thinks first of Caliban, “chained to his pitted rock.”
The uncanny is precisely a horror of representation as such, representation of the
172
mirror phase's misrecognition, which can replicate itself ad infinitum. Thus it is by
nature secondary, if not tertiary. Cannibalism is a zero point, or rather not a return of the
repressed, but the eternal real in the Lacanian sense of the unrepresentable.
A fear of blindness in classical Freud is a fear of castration, and excess is that which
survives castration, or rather is not castrated enough. Lacan has it that the "gaze" is not
the gaze of a small o other, the imaginary male other of the "real" world, but rather the
place from which (a nonexistent place) we presume that the big Other is viewing us
(which symbolically functions as phallic). Gaze thus becomes "object" because it is a
trajectory without either origin or destination. It is pure seeing/being seen. As a "drive" it
thus manifests origin and telos as imaginary, the necessary nodes for imagining image as
such.

But even the eternal, eternally real cannibal does not necessarily find visibility, as we see
in “The Tempest.” “The cannibal is too monstrous to (need to) behold” because
cannibalism is precisely not a transgression of the law — a possession that passes through
law — but rather a possession that law will not possess as its own.

It preexists law,
173
culture, and "the gaze" and so has a proleptic relationship to these former categories. It
172
Ibid. 13.
173
And it also moves it already into the metaphorical, and indeed since this moment
cannibalism and the savage are synonymous. Cannibalism becomes a modality through
which to oppress an other rather than a thing itself.
97

appears as unviewable because the view has not accounted for it. It will never be
explored but will manifest as the very seam between the literal and figurative.
Cannibalism, then, would be Freud's "dark continent," which is apposite but not opposite
in any Manichean sense. That is why Othello and Caliban appear as oblique neighbors
rather than clear enemies. [Othello is an “other”, too, if a benevolent one and one who is
only discriminated against by the villainous Iago].

And so the very concept of
174
spectatorship presumes a safe viewer and a violated object of spectacle, when in fact the
scene of the spectacular distends rather than destroys these positions and thereby
produces the uncanny not as "not me" but “more than me.”
After Shakespeare the cannibal comes closer to home through Marxism. Marxian
critiques of consumption continue Marx’s original metaphors about capitalism and
cannibalism. In “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism”, Crystal
Bartolovich reminds us of the longstanding connection between capital and cannibal:
“Stories about cannibals played a crucial ideological role in the primitive accumulation
of—the establishment of the conditions for the possibility for—capital.”

Bartolovich
175
takes care to point out that these roots do not presuppose a capitalist economic ‘base’
from the early modern world; nevertheless, the roots for Marxism were, in some sense,
already in place. The examples from Marx himself linking capitalism and cannibalism
174
For more on the connection between Othello, Caliban and Shylock, see
“Shakespeare’s Others”.
175
Crystal Bartolovich. “Consumerism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Cannibalism” in
Cannibalism and the Colonial World . (London: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 202.
98

are too many to mention: as but one example, “…There is no natural obstacle absolutely
preventing one man from lifting from himself the burden of labor necessary to maintain
his own existence, and imposing it on another, just as there is no unconquerable natural
obstacle to the consumption of the flesh of one man by another.”

In his tract On the
176
Essence of Money (1843), Moses Hess, one of the radical German authors whom Marx
cited as an influence, describes money metaphorically as the coagulated blood and sweat
of those who sell their inalienable property. Laborers exchange their vital activity for
capital and thus cannibalistically feed on their own fat. Money is an alienated form of
human flesh and blood, which thus renders us all cannibals, beasts of prey, vampires.
177
The metaphors are inescapable.
“Gay sex has always been cannibal murder”
Queer theorist Diana Fuss approaches the linkage of homosexuality and cannibalism
through a close reading of the body and the interplay between the orfices of the mouth
and the anus. Published in 1995, Identification Papers draws upon the contemporary
crisis of AIDS and how the rectum functions as a “contaminated and contaminating
vessel” that often leads to sickness/death.

And yet there are generative, restorative
178179
powers here, too: At the end of "Is the Rectum a Grave?" Bersani suggests that it
176
Karl Marx Reprinted in Selected Writings , ed David McLellan. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977),99.
177
“Gay sex has always been cannibal murder” as well, Ibid., 253.
178
Diana Fuss, Inside Out (New York: Routledge, 1991), 244.
179
For more on this see Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum the Grave?” and Edelman, Lee “No
Future” in Fuss, Diana (ed). Inside Out . For critiques of each of the above see Judith
Halberstam et al, [MLAA special issue]
99

may...be in the gay man's rectum that he demolishes his own perhaps otherwise
uncontrollable identification with a murderous judgment against him.Something similar
occurs with the mouth? Fuss goes on to explain how each orfice comes to stand in for
the other—“(the anus) can take in as well as eject, just as the mouth can expel as well as
receive.” and they both function as symbols/holes that cannibalistically swallow the
other. The roots of this conflation can be traced back to Freudian psychology: “Not until
the third edition of Three Essays does Freud finally distinguish between the “oral or
cannibalistic phase” and the “sadistic anal phase” ; furthermore, “Commentators on
Freud’s theory of the drives tend to emphasize their dynamism and porousness.”
180
It should come as no surprise that for Freud the mouth is the orifice that dominates our
earliest life experiences: as he contends, “sucking at the mother’s breast is the
startingpoint of the whole of sexual life, the unmatched prototype of every later
satisfaction…”

Although, or perhaps because of this, it remains “the least developed
181
of the libidinal zones”. Because so much of the world is experienced through the mouth
in one’s early life, “(there is) no need to be too much horrified at finding in a woman the
idea of sucking a male organ,” for after all this “repellant impulse” has “a most innocent
origin, since it was derived from sucking at the mother’s breast.” It is only when the
subject fails to progress from this stage that Freud moves him into the category of
perversion—that is, when the mouth and anus are the only loci of sexually active
erogenous zones. Thus it is the question of “exclusiveness” and “fixation” that
180
Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 48.
181
Ibid., 49.
100

distinguishes between normality and perversion, in sexual acts, even if the acts are
structurally identical .

As she concludes, “It appears that Freud, in the end, wants to
182
have his phallus and eat it too.”
183
In the above psychoanalytic model, male homosexuality is a sexuality stunted at the
initial, oralcannibalistic, stage of sexual development. The subject does not relinquish
its first object of attraction, his mother’s breast, but rather…”he ingests the mother, puts
himself in her place, identifies himself with her, and takes his own person as a model in
whose likeness he chooses the new objects of his love.”

The incorporation of the
184
mother—(m)other—enables both same sex object choices and sadistic impulses all at
once.
185
Where LeviStrauss reads woman as a sign, a token of exchange, Gayle Rubin reads
womanhood as a condition of fungibility. Cannibalism seems to work in the same way
by smearing symbolic systems as such; was cannibalism ever properly prohibited for the
"family of man"? Does the insistence on its noxious existence, or remainder, in so many
modern uncivilized contexts justify the universality of the incest taboo in structural
anthropology, and therefore the immanent civilizationability of the primitive? Hardly the
question, though might both cannibalism and homosexuality function as a metareturn of
the repressed for the structuralist, just as the real and the textual meet at the flesh for
182
Ibid., 56.
183
Ibid.
184
Ibid, 59.
185
i.e., killing and (by) eating
101

Jeffrey Dahmer?
“I know it’s stupid, Dad, but I just like to experiment.”
If cannibalistic hunger for flesh as a metaphor for homosexual desire, there are few
better examples than Jeffrey Dahmer (who makes this metaphor all too literal). Dahmer
moves us out of the past and (even more firmly) into the present and into the ways in
which tropes of orality, eating and identity were always already but now all the more
inextricably linked. The long history of connecting homosexuality and cannibalism is
nothing new, though by literally eating the other—taking the outside in—he moves us
out of metaphor into literal. His particular proclivities in terms of the bodies he killed
and ate, and the rationale behind these perverse feasts, speaks to cannibalisms relevance
in today’s world. After all, you are what you eat.

In “The Infinite Series: Fathers, Cannibals, Chemists…”, Akira Lippit cites Lionel
Dahmer, the longsuffering father of the late Jeffrey Dahmer, as he recounts the struggle
to feed his son when he was a baby: “He seemed to take a fierce joy in this practice,
laughing all the way down to the bottom of his stomach, his whole body shaking, as if
seized in a frenzy of enjoyment.”

The ecstasy young Jeffrey displayed in taking in and
186
spitting out his food is, in some sense, utterly ordinary: psychology has long since traced
the various phases of oral development, and the infant’s primal insistence of the earliest
186
Akira Lippit, “The Infinite Series: Fathers, Cannibals, Chemists…” Criticism ,
Summer 1996, Vol. XXXVIII, No.3, 351.
102

desire for pleasure embodied by baby Jeffrey seems not abnormal. Marie Langer charts
this evolution below.

The sexual pleasure corresponding to the “first oral phase” is
sucking…the desired object…is the maternal breast...this phase is free of
the conflict between love and hate.

In the second, or cannibalistic, oral
187
phase the mode (of desire) is… biting and chewing. Now the infant
wishes to use her teeth and to destroy all the objects with which she
comes into contact…(s)he treats the person connected to her as food…
The desire to eat includes simultaneous loving feelings and aggressive
urges.
188

For Langer, the arrival of teeth drastically alters the search for/consummation of
pleasure. The existential undifferentiation of the first oral phase shifts to an paradoxical,
or at least ambivalent desire—i.e., to have the other and to destroy the other; to treat
everyone and everything as food—in the second. These parameters are universalized
through the language of psychoanalysis, to be sure; still, Of course, Dahmer’s refusal to
leave behind this second stage and hold onto it into adulthood makes this both literal and
terrifying.
when viewed through the lens of hindsight the jouissance that baby Jeffrey experienced
may have been, as Lippit puts it, his “first taste of cannibalism, it’s madeline.”

Though Dahmer showed signs of violence and disturbance for most of his life—the
almost predictable mistreatment of animals, as well as a fascination with chemistry and
experiments— he did not begin to kill and eat people until he was an adult. As Lippit
187
The reason for this preambivalence, as Langer understands it, is that the child is not
yet aware that through the act of swallowing the milk (s)he also destroys it.
188
Langer, 94.
103

points out: “Later, Dahmer would claim that a note passed to him in the West Allis
Library offering him a blow job had accelerated his descent into cannibalism: eat or be
eaten.” Perhaps this note was, in fact, Dahmer’s madeline. At the very least this incident
and the importance he assigns to it recalls the idea of “homosexual panic.”
The concept dates back to 1920 and is defined as a condition of “panic due to the
pressure of uncontrollable perverse sexual cravings.” If cannibalism is an especially apt
metaphor for male homosexual desire, in particular, because of how it frames denial,
desire, and the act of consumption, Dahmer’s desire for and aversion towards sexual
activity with other men exploded into a literal cannibal binge. “Homosexual panic can
converge in a potent, explosive, and dangerous way to brand homosexuality itself as
serial killing.”
189

Drawing on Freud's understanding of all sexual desire as involving both identification
and difference, theorist Leo Bersani suggests in his seminal essay "Is the Rectum a
Grave?" that " homoness itself necessitates a massive redefining of relationality."

This
190
is because "its privileging of sameness has, as its condition of possibility, an
indeterminate identity. Homosexual desire is desire for the same from the the
perspective of a self already identified as different from itself," and so it is an "an
outlaw existence," at once "unacceptable" and "indispensable."

At the conclusion of
191
"Is the Rectum a Grave?" Bersani suggests that it may be in the gay man's rectum that he
189
Fuss, 76,
190
Ibid. 76. (Author's italics).
191
Ibid. 59.
104

demolishes his own perhaps otherwise unstoppable identification with a murderous
judgment against him.

Maggie Kilgour is more specific about how the cannibal paradigm, the “archetypal
other” is all too applicable in the case of Jeffrey Dahmer: “…while serving thus as a foil
to the European subject the cannibal threatened to swallow it, both literally and also
through representing the danger of ‘going native,’ which would cause the civilized man
to an original state of barbarism. Conquest was thus justified by the law of the jungle:
swallow or be swallowed.”
192

Indeed, Dahmer was swallowed up by his swallowing up for years. “The only sign of
Jeffrey Dahmer’s “inside”, the only index of its existence, may have been Dahmer’s
alcoholism—an addiction to what Dahmer called “his medicine.”

By numerous
193
accounts alcohol was a continuous thread in Dahmer’s life, starting at an early age and
continuing if not ramping up during his cannibal binges. Like the cannibal himself, the
alcoholic has a different relationship between self and other, or, “…between the inside
and outside of experience.”

He is consumed by that which he consumes, and this
194
medicine is always also a poison that threatens to consume the one who consumes it.

The answer to ‘What’s your poison?’, is twofold and clear.
192
Maggie Kilgour, “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time” in Cannibalism
and the Colonial World ed Barker, Hulme & Iversen, (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 243.
193
Lippit, 352.
194
Lippit, 352.
105

Dahmer was awash in, and drowning in, alcohol. He foisted this fate upon his victims,
as well, both preand postmortem: after getting them drunk before and during he
attacked them, he used jars of alcohol to preserve their uneaten body parts after death.
He repeatedly said that he ate his victims so that even as they left the world they would
stay with him. The alcohol preserved his victims and his secrets. “Dahmer’s medicine,”
Lippit observes, “preserved Jeffrey within himself.”
195

There is another layer to Dahmer’s homosexual panic, one that makes him a terribly apt
postcolonial case study: he ate men of color.

“Dahmer’s immersion in chocolate and
196
his practice of cannibalizing black and brown men appears to indicate the existence of a
cryptonymic economy: a secret idiom that connects African Americans with chocolate,
human beings with food.”

Just as his chemist father had unwittingly taught his son
197
how to use bodies for perverse science experiments, his time as a chocolate mixer may
have prompted his son to conceive of bodies as food. (His father raised the possibility
that his son cemented his racist politics while on military assignment in Germany).
198

It is not until others literally put the pieces together—the literal pieces of dismembered
victims as well as the countless pieces of his complicated life—that Dahmer’s secrets
surfaced, and what was buried deep within his “inside” (“the site of his displaced
195
Ibid, 353.
196
Ibid., 362
197
Ibid.
198
Ibid. 363.
106

unconscious, his stomach”) finally came to the outside, perhaps in the visceral scream he
let out when exposed.

Jeffrey Dahmer came to be defined by what he ate, but how
199
something like taste came to confer sensibility outside of the realm of food in the first
place?

“I am always touched by your presence, dear…I am still in touch
with your presence dear dear dear dear dear…”

“The very mobilization of the word “taste” to describe refined and discerning choice
(and the social status that might go with it) should alert us to the way that bodily
sensorial life is implied in such judgments from the start.”

Affect studies, a theoretical
200
field that organizes mental experiences with an emphasis on their bodily manifestations,
is the primary field to consider such relationships through a critical frame. While these
structures of feeling and their interplay between materialities have garnered increased
academic attention in recent years, a precise definition of affect (or one with widespread
theoretical consensus) remains difficult to locate. Perhaps this difficulty is inescapable:
capturing affect requires deciphering the densely woven codes of a body, as well as its
interplay with the world around it. In “An Inventory of Shimmers” Gregory Seigworth
199
Lippit recounts the sequence of events that unfolded when Dahmer was captured as
per the testimony of his neighbor: “When he was caught—the moment the inside came
outside, became apparent to the outside—Dahmer is said to have let out a bloodcurdling
wail: “All those forces seething inside him erupted to life.” Finally everyone pieced
together what he was tearing apart and what was tearing him apart. John Batchelor,
Dahmer’s neighbor and a witness to the arrest said, “It was a screeching I’ll never forget.
It was terrible. It almost made me throw up.”,
200
Ben Highmore, “Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food and Social Aesthetics” in Affect
Studies Reader , (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 124.
107

and Melissa Gregg describe affect in the following way: “Affect arises in the midst of
inbetweenness : in the capacity to act and be acted upon…That is, affect is found in
those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, partbody and otherwise), in
those resonances that circulate about, between and sometimes stick to bodies and
worlds...”.

These tangled webs cannot—and should not—be unwoven.
201

To that end, the aforementioned sense of “inbetweenness” will be used as a point of
unification between affect studies with the inside/outside theme of this chapter.
Beginning with an analysis of taste, vis a vis aesthetics and affect, that will then move
into a treatment of disgust. Disgust, largely considered to be on the fringe of affect
studies, will be examined through its relationship with cannibalism—one that contains
the seemingly contradictory elements of fascination and repulsion and helps explain the
return to a figure from which we might expect to only turn away. Disgust is also which
shows the inside outside.

In “Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food and Social Aesthetics” Ben Highmore seeks to
unpack the relationship between the concept of taste—which seems, at least
superficially, to be a concept relegated to the physical—came to embody so much more.
He locates beginnings of an explanation to this in the realm of aesthetics. For Highmore
contemporary notions of affect are linked to previously defined/longer standing
traditions of aesthetics. As an area of philosophical inquiry, aesthetics emerged from the
201
Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, “An Inventory of Shimmers” in Affect Studies
Reader , (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010),1.
108

work of eighteenth century philosopher Alexander Baumgarten. Prior to Baumgarten’s
intervention, aesthetics was understood to denote a sensation, or the ability to receive a
sensation from any one of the five senses; that is, as a sensory experience devoid of a
hierarchy to be used to analyze what the subject did and did not respond to.
202

Highmore traces the reemergence of the body in both cultural and academic languages
in the past few decades, which he attributes to “the shift away from the perceived
obscurities and ultra abstractions of advanced textualism.”

Body studies sought to
203
explain and distinguish between bodily practices in different sociocultural contexts but
failed to engage with the viscerality of the bodies in question. That is, in spite of the
increased presence of the body in academic discourses there was an absence of the inner
workings of that body: “the body that eats, that works, that dies, that is afraid—that body
just isn’t there.”

The tension between a physical body and a figural one has a long
204
history in philosophy, to be sure—but it is the bloodlessness of the body in question in
contemporary conversations that begs attention to the materiality of the body itself, to
the meanings and experiences below the surface.

In conceptualizing how bodies shake up assumptions about their boundedness–what we
take to be our own and how one body relates to others–Gilles Deleuze noted that
202
Highmore, 124.
203
Ibid, 127.
204
Ibid.
109

“[w]riting is a corporeal activity.”

In the manner of Spinoza, he argues that the body is
205
not a unified entity but is composed of many moving elements, neither solely inside nor
outside; “In Deleuze’s description of writing shame,” Probyn observed, “the body of the
writer becomes the battleground where ideas and experiences collide, sometimes to
produce new visions of life.”

Deleuze notes that not only does “affect give you away,”
206
but also helps clarify your feelings to yourself: “Could you possibly ‘feel’ that you were
in love if you couldn’t also feel your beating heart climbing into your throat or your
palms sweat? Would I really be moved by a tragedy if I didn’t experience rivulets of
tears trickling down my cheeks?”

In other words, both the self and the other utilize
207
bodily affect to decipher meaning.

Language as a compromised grounds from which we denote affective experience is the
very juncture of the intersection of the metaphysical and the physical: we are moved by a
sentiment; our feelings are hurt. And we speak of bitterness, an “emotional condition,”
as a flavor. Here Highmore provides synesthesia as a model of understanding: “The
neurological condition of synesthesia (where one cognitive pathway bleeds into and
triggers another, resulting in, for instance, sound being perceived as color) offers an
extreme example of a more general condition of sensual interconnection.”

To
208
205
Gilles Deleuze quoted in Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory
Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010),89.
206
Elspeth Probyn, “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010), 76.
207
Highmore, 120.
208
Ibid.
110

foreground one sense at the exclusion of all others would thus give an incomplete
account of what actually happens when one eats.

In a way, an analytical move from affect to disgust via the abject here entails a move
from our reactions to disgust to what is disgusting, i.e., that which shows the insides of
the body on the outside.   Disgust is perhaps at its height when it is directed at ingested or
nearlyingested foods and when it simultaneously invokes a form of sensual perception,
an affective register of shame and disdain, at the same time it engenders desire. Our
experience of abjection can largely be distilled to the threatened erosion of the boundary,
or distinction, between subject and object, or self and other. The abject is precisely not
an object; it is that which marks the blur between subject and object, that which the ruse
of the “one” cannot get rid of. Kristeva’s abjection is one that haunts the psyche. She
writes, “[t]he primary example is the corpse (which traumatically reminds us of our own
materiality); however, other items can elicit the same reaction: the open wound, shit,
sewage, even a particular crime (e.g., Auschwitz).”
209

In Ugly Feelings , Sianne Ngai situates disgust in the afterward rather than in the body of
the book. Explaining that disgust has, by and large, been sheltered from the critical lens,
she wonders if it belongs within the canon of what she calls “ugly feelings.”

She sets
210
up an opposition of desire vs disgust: for her disgust is “strong; immutable” and desire is
209
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection . (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 12.

210
She further asks: “Is disgust the ugliest of feelings or an exception?”
111

“amorphous; individual.”

The avowal of disgust both expects concurrence and
211
impedes empathy.

“Disgust entails a sense of ecstatic rupture that is best described with the concept of
jouissance : unlike “ plaisir ” or pleasure, which is comforting, egoreassuring, and
legitimated culturally, “ jouissance ” is shocking, egodisruptive, and generally
unrecognized by mainstream culture.”

But Kant problematizes, or at least complicates,
212
Ngai’s opposition when he dwells upon the allure of the disgusting in Critique of
Judgment : while he writes “nothing is so much set against the beautiful as disgust”, he
continues “what makes the object abhorrent is precisely its outrageous claim for
desirability, disgusting seems to say you want me, imposing itself on the subject as
something to be mingled with and perhaps even enjoyed.” The split between disgust and
desire thus seems paradoxically internal to Kantian disgust, i.e., disgust both includes
and attacks the very opposition between itself and desire.

Expressions of disgust do
213
solicit a response: in other words, when we designate something or someone as
disgusting, we seek reassurance that we are not alone in our relation to the disgusting
object.

211
Ngai, 336.
212
Ibid., 332
213
As an example of this point, she cites Proust’s narrator and his initial experience of
Gilberte :“I thought her so beautiful…I think you are hideous, grotesque, how I loathe
you“
112

“Disgust seems to erupt immediately, spontaneously from the gut.”

As Pasi Falk
214
writes, the disgusting ‘is represented as something forcing into pleasure—‘insisting’ that
it be enjoyed…which we strive against it with all of our might’.

Disgust is understood
215
to violate the abstraction or distance that philosophies of aesthetics have long privileged.
In these terms, if there is desire for the object, a desire for the realization—be it eating or
sexual contact—then there is no aesthetic experience…our bodies react with disgust
precisely because of the resistance towards the abolition of representative distance. To
cite the example that Schopenhauer uses to explicate Kant’s ideas, the Dutch tradition of
culinary stilllife was unacceptable because it represented articles of food which
‘necessarily excited the appetite for the things they represent, thus exciting the will, and
putting an end ‘to all aesthetic contemplation of the object.
216

What better example than oysters, says Elspeth Probyn. She describes them as “the
slime, the brackish fluid, the sweet flesh so soft that it scarcely holds itself together…a
remembered dream of oral sex (Is good sex possible with someone who finds oysters
disgusting, she later adds.”

French’s work here bears relevance: ”The problem is that
217
we’ve all been taught that food should be fresh and wholesome, just as we’ve been
taught that sex should be all about uncomplicated, rational pleasure.’

Probyn
218
214
Or what they have not ingested: “If anorexics make us feel queasy, in what way do
anorexics find themselves disgusting? Studies show that, in general, anorexics
desperately seek not to be seen, as if sight would confirm that they are disgusting.”
(130).
215
Pasi Falk, The Consuming Body (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1994), 194.
216
Ibid., 192.
217
Probyn, Carnal Appetites (London: Routledge, 2000), 135.
218
(Ibid., 1995: 199).
113

intervenes “If, as I have argued, the mere ampersanding of food and sex leaves me cold,
the interruption of desire, disgust, and shame within eating can, I think, provoke new
connections.”

As French puts it, “much of the pleasure of food is a flirtation with the
219
processes of decay.”

This pursuit prods Nietzsche’s question of whether anyone
220
knows the moral effects of food. The cannibal!

For Walter Benjamin, “all disgust is originally disgust at touching.”

…Benjamin
221
elaborates on this disgust occasioned by touching animals. At the heart of it lies the fear
and the horror that ‘in him something lives so akin to the animal that it might be
recognized.’ [in order to calm this terror, to make sense once again of the distinctiveness
of human versus animal, we eat the beast. But this is, says Benjamin, a ‘drastic gesture
that overleaps its mark.’ Is this disgust teetering on the boundary of the edible? Perhaps
Laura Mulvey speaks to this in her reading of Cindy Sherman’s famous photographs of
bodily fluids: “in the last resort, nothing is left but disgust—the disgust of sexual
detritus, decaying food, vomit, slime, menstrual blood, hair.”

Does this idea recognize
222
the difference between the inside and outside (of) the body and what should and should
not be let in? Might this be the space we locate the cannibal?

Theorists like Lauren Berlant suggest that the study of affect is a means to unlock our
understanding of the present. In “Cruel Optimism” she names and then outlines the
219
Probyn, Carnal Appetites (London: Routledge, 2000), 141.
220
Ibid., 146.
221
Laura Mulvey quoted in Probyn, Carnal Appetites (London: Routledge, 2000), 144
222
Ibid.
114

parameters of certain forms of attachment : for Berlant, ‘Cruel optimism’ refers to “a
relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is
discovered either to be im possible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.”

She
223
continues: ”This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is
enacted in the subject’s desire to temporize an experience of the loss of an object or
scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition
of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss.”
224

Though this may sound tangential to cannibalism it is a form of consumptive desire to be
sure. The types of attachments delineated by the phrase are precisely those of an
obsessive appetite. And while under this rubric all attachments are optimistic she notes
that they are not all experienced as optimistic, or pleasurable, by their possessor. “One
might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger…but the surrender to the return
to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as
an affective form.
225

223
Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010),
224
Ibid., 94. She continues: “What’s cruel about these attachments, and not merely
inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well
endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their
well being; because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form
of it provides something of the continuity of the subjects sense of what it means to keep
on living on and to look forward to being in the world.”
225
Berlant, 93.
115

Conceiving of attachments as optimistic and objects of desire as promises to be made or
broken, for Berlant, allows us to make sense of the strange, the nonsensical, even the
sadomasochistic. It is a desire to remain close to these promises perceived to inhabit the
object of choice, (however plausible or implausible they may be) that compels the
subject. Some of this may be clear to him and some may not: it is no matter, though, this
new economy holds room for the opaque.

“Is eating better than sex? The answer is, of course, it depends”

Moving from the body to the viscerality of eating, we can extrapolate these same forces
and see how they work in the economy of eating. The idea of civilizations being defined
by what they eat dates back centuries, Adam Smith’s work in Wealth of Nations in 1776
as but one example.
226
As Elspeth Probyn suggests in Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities , “eating has a messy
and promising history to tell about the dialectical struggles between pleasure and disgust,
affect and aesthetics, dominance and resists, and the interpenetrations of all of the
above.” The cannibal, as we have seen, has a paradoxical ability to both erect and
dismantle boundaries. Here, eating operates similarly: “eating threatens the foundational
fantasies of a contained autonomous self, because, as a function of its basic mechanics,
eating transcended the gap between self and other, blurring the line between subject and
226
Adam Smith contended that “savage” nations could not wage largescale war because
they live in small tribes. This form of cohabitation is determined by their diet. Hunting,
he argues, cannot support large numbers of people.
116

object as food turned into tissue, muscle, and nerve and then provided the energy that
drives them all.”
227
In December 2014/January 2015, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly released the twopart
special issue “On the Visceral: Race, Sex, Eating and Other Gut Feelings” It was
coedited by Kyla Wazana Tompkins, whose 2012 work Racial Indigestion: Eating
Bodies in the 19th Century ushered in a new level of attention to the connections
between identity and food. Racial Indigestion explores the way in which eating
produces subjecthood as well as the discourses around such production. Tompkins coins
the phrase “queer alimentarity” and employs it as a way of interpreting the parterotic,
partviolent, and entirely consuming processes that occur within the mouth. She writes,
“In some ways I have tried to do for the cultural history of the mouth what Bersani did
for the other end of the alimentary canal, in his seminal article “Is the Rectum a Grave?”
I have argued…that eating has a messy and promising history to tell about the dialectical
struggles between pleasure and disgust, affect and aesthetics, dominance and resistance,
and the interpenetrations of all of the above.”
228
“On the Visceral” brings the nascent field of Critical Eating Studies to a (more)
mainstream audience. Situating themselves at the intersection of food studies, critical
race studies and sexuality studies, scholars bring diverse fields of expertise together to
227
Ngai, 96.
228
Kyla Wazana Tompkins et al, “On the Visceral” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies . Duke University Press Volume 20, no. 4, December 2014.
117

ask questions about the multivalent role of eating in our lives. “Could something as
common as eating contain the seeds of an extraordinary reflection, a visceral reaction to
who and what we are becoming? In mining eating and its qualities, might we glimpse
gut reactions to the histories and present of the cultures in which we live?”
229

What centers eating as a vital focal point of interdisciplinary analysis is also the very
thing that precludes it: it’s omnipresence. “The colloquial nature of eating, its
everydayness, and the biological imperative that makes eating a necessity often render it
invisible as a highly discursive as well as material practice.... Many of the sites in the
digestive process—the mouth to the anus—are linked by the erotic and material
economies that emerged from colonialism and slavery. ”
230

“The body, finally, has often been at issue…in truth, the final phase of LeviStrauss’
work is the theater of a closely fought match between the unity of the human mind and
the multiplicity of the Amerindian body. When things get underway in the Overture to
The Raw and the Cooked , the mind starts with an advantage, but the body progressively
gets the upper hand and then carries the long match, although only by points—by means
of a little clinamen that intensifies in the final rounds, which are played out in The Story
of Lynx .
229
Kyla Wazana Tompkins et al, “On the Visceral” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies . Duke University Press Volume 20, no. 4, December 2014.
230
Ibid.
118

“The body is the principal locale of the idioms and fantasies used in depicting power,”
Foucault notes, and “the body in question is first a body that eats a drinks, and second a
body that is open.”

Beyond affect, then, the modes of relationality amongst humans
231
and non humans is also one that gets at the deeply human condition of being inhabited
by other(ness).

At what point, then, does consumption constitute subjectivity, and when exactly do
consumptive practices—actual or darkly dreamt—frame fitness for civilization? To
what extent are lips the liminal border of the political? “The history of the body,”
Foucault continues, “is one directly involved in the forces around it, political, structures
of power, etc.
”
In the context of the colonial and postcolonial alike, when bodies that
232
are definitionally and categorically denied sovereignty are figured as queer, a distinctly
cannibalistic logic is at play.

”The psychology of the human mind cedes its place to an antisociology of the
indigenous body.”

“The disturbing final message of The Story of Lynx is that the other
233
of the others is also Other: that there is a space for a “we” only if it is already determined
231
Ibid.
232
Quoted in Bordo, “Anorexia Nervosa: Psychopathology as the Crystallization of
Culture”, 28.
233
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics , (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014), 216.
119

by alterity…in defining the Mythologies as the myth of mythology and anthropological
knowledge as a transformation of indigenous praxis, LeviStrauss’ anthropology projects
a philosophy to come: AntiNarcissus .”
234


234
Ibid.
120

Post Script: P.S. from P.S.

121

Palm Springs first. What to say about this place except
that from the beginning it carried the seeds of its own affliction
…everywhere and always the desert.
JeanPaul Dubois

Can a city be a cannibal?

Undeniably there is a long history of connections between culture narrative and the
human body. The cannibals of Trouble Every Day conceived of the human body as a
space or a thing to be occupied. Again, JeanLuc Nancy’s writing guides. Bodies are
open, rather than full...‘the body is that which gives rise to (literally, gives space or gives
room to) existence. The body is that which spaces space.”
235

I want to suggest the utter lack of distance between self and space can be used to
examine “this cauldron, this oven of recooked sand…” known as Palm Springs.
236

As Martine Beugnet explains regarding the use of the term “metropole”: “… this term,
used to designate both a capital city and a state that rules over a colonial empire, derives
235
JeanLuc Nancy, quoted in Douglas Morrey, “Open Wounds: Body and Image in
JeanLuc Nancy and Claire Denis”, FilmPhilosophy , vol. 12, no.1, 10.

236
JeanPaul Dubois (introduction), Robert Doisneau, Palm Springs 1960 , (Palm
Springs: Flammarion 2009), 8.
122

from the ancient Greek terms for city and for mother. In keeping with such terminology,
the inhabitants of the colonies were often described as children.”
237

Beugnet’s etymology calls to mind the euphemism “motherland” or “mother colony”
used to denote the home of the colonial empire. These terms speak to the utter lack of
distance between self and space wherein the self/other difference is manifested on land
itself, which takes on a corporeality of its own. Susan Hayward asserts the corporeality
of city space. She writes: “(Within every city)…there are two cities: there is, first, a city
of our imaginings including a repressed city of our imaginings that is a certain type of
body—a corporeality that is linked to our psyche [it’s in there in our minds and it’s real];
and, second, there is an invisiblised city of our suppressed imaginings, another type of
‘body’—a corporeality that is linked to a fragmented social existentiality [‘it’s out there
in the world and it’s real].”

Bodies and borders, and the borders of bodies, are vague.
238

A consideration of city space—Palm Springs in particular—has at its heart the book
Palm Springs 1960 . This book is a composition of the outtakes of an absurdly
commissioned photo spread with an almost absurdist title, “Grass and Pleasure Grow in
the Desert”, featured in Fortune Magazine 1960; the book also features a smattering of
writings from photographer Robert Doisneau as well as introductionascommentary by
237
Susan Hayward. “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French
Cinema (1950s1990s) in Spaces in European Cinema, ed. Myrto Konstantarakos.
(Portland: Intellect Press, 2000), 100.
238
Martine Beugnet, “Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression”
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 162.
123

JeanPaul Dubois. What is perhaps his finest line also gets at the layers of strangeness at
work here: “What an odd idea! I am not talking about… but about Palm Springs.”
239
The choice of Robert Doisneau, renowned French photographer known for his realist
style, to “carry out a color shoot of one of the most artificial towns in America: further
befuddled him. Upon his arrival in Palm Springs Doisneau himself agreed: “I feel as if I
belong to another age, like a Louis XV armchair in an airfield.”
240

Palm Springs, which lies even beyond what Karen Tongson, in Relocations: Queer
Suburban Imaginaries , deems the “lesser Los Angeles”, that vast sprawl of land on the
infinity that is the 10 east.

Tongson problematizes the (previously) dominant concept
241
of “queer metrovity” by pointing out that in recent decades there has been a
demographic shift from the metropolis to the suburb. As she writes, “…the primacy of
‘the city’ in queer studies fails to take into account new destinations as well as the new
migrations and immigration patterns that have radically restructured queer life, art, and
sociability in late capitalism—a socioeconomic context that has thwarted neat divisions
between urban, suburban, and rural lifestyles as well as architectures.”
242

The queerscape of the cityturnedsuburb certainly seems to be a cannibalistic one.
“One hundred and twentyfive golf courses, 2,250 holes, or rather continually thirsty
239
Ibid., 10.
240
Ibid.,
241
Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York
University Press, 2011), 20.
242
Ibid., 73.
124

pits, which soak up 1.2 million gallons of water just to survive…”

Dubois adds:
243
“Seeing this, knowing that, …“Doisneau could legitimately ask himself if he was on the
other side of the world or at its end.”
244

Most of the photographs feature old, wealthy couples cloaked in furs amidst backdrops
of merciless sun…”aging subjects wandering around a kind of American emirate within
the folds of an age in the process of congealing before slowly disappearing, even as it
was still busy rising from the ground. Killing and being born…”

Something of this
245
killing and being born arises in the swimming pools that figure so prominently, so
insistently. “Pools without dives or splashes…these (empty) waterholes empty of any
swimmers and thereby empty of reason…(they) resound like a depressing mantra…”
246
Even the pools drown themselves.

One gilded frame shows yet another empty pool waiting for something, anything to fall
on or in, its unmoving surface like some outstretched strongarms of both i mmanent
violence and embrace. Nearby sits a giltframed figure ripped from the pages of a time
243
JeanPaul Dubois (introduction), Robert Doisneau, Palm Springs 1960 , (Palm
Springs: Flammarion 2009), 8.
244
JeanPaul Dubois (introduction), Robert Doisneau, Palm Springs 1960 , (Palm
Springs: Flammarion 2009), 8.
245
JeanPaul Dubois (introduction), Robert Doisneau, Palm Springs 1960 , (Palm
Springs: Flammarion 2009), 8.
246
The passage continues: “I remember a despondent seventyyearold who had
achieved his life’s dream: having worked with four telephones in his office, he now
owned not one but two pools separated by a mirror. One for the summer and one for the
winter, the latter went into the living room. His rheumatism began the day he entered the
water.”
125

and space far away. That they are presented together seems kind of queer, a gesture of
eternity but not necessarily destiny, an eternal present of impressing.

126

Conclusion

127

The maneating myth is still with us, but now explicitly
revealed to be a story about ourselves.
William Arens

Where to conclude but at the beginning: why cannibalism, and why now?

We continue to be haunted by the figure of the cannibal, even as the accounts of them
are increasingly shown to be problematic. Without returning directly to Freud it may be
worth wondering how we have repressed or reexpressed our repetition compulsion,
which claims that we are destined to repeat the primal deeds of our forefathers, with
cannibalism?

Certainly one way of understanding this is through nostalgia—an attachment to the
primitive, the natural, in the world of late modernity.

The cannibal is a rapacious figure who represents all that a civilization as it defines itself
wants to insist that it is not. Maggie Kilgour writes, “As the modern western ego is
founded upon faith in production, progress, and individual autonomy, the cannibal
inversely represents consumption, regress, and the annihilation of discrete identity.”
247
247
Maggie Kilgour, “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time” in Cannibalism
and the Colonial World ed Barker, Hulme & Iversen, (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 248.
128

We might have predicted this. She continues, “…our interest in the topic today seems to
correspond to other forms of nostalgia: our longings for lost decades, worlds, species,
even barely buried fashions, as well as a deeper, if ambivalent, desire to recover a time
before the emergence of modern individuated subjectivity.
248

The body remains a point of ongoing fascination, especially in socalled secular times.
The cannibal troubles our contemporary humanity, which are predicated upon
difference, separation from one another.

As Agamben explains, the homo sacer is
249
“..an obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in which human life is included in the
juridical order solely in the form of its exclusion [that is, of its capacity to be killed].”
250
In Flesh of my Flesh Kaja Silverman echoes this construction as she simultaneously
pinpoints key moments in our shift from subject construction based on similarity to one
based on difference. She writes of “ontological kinship” and argues that various figures
who have returned their focus to analogy “…think of it as a kind of flesh.”

The
251
cannibal dislodges fundamental concepts of humanness and (re)ignites primal anxiety ,
a figure who needs to language and obeys no/passes through the unpassable boundaries.

Indeed the very structures of ‘civilization’—the ones that purported to discipline and
punish cannibals, among others—are complicit in their construction. “It is the civilized
nations that are cruel and depraved,” writes Rousseau in Discourse on the Origins of
248
Ibid., 247.
249

250
Agamben as quoted in Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism .
(trans: Alistair Ian Blyth). (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

251
Kaja Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh . New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009), 4.
129

Inequality .

The culpability here goes beyond the individual. In Perpetual Peace: A
252
Philosophical Sketch , Kant points toward the nature of the modern state as being
productive of wars. Avramescu writes, “In the Kantian analysis, the power of the
modern Christian sovereign grows according to an ascendant and implacable logic,
which leads to a devastating denouement of universal signification. This is the moment
at which the cannibal disappears as a subject of the science of moral order, because he
has been eclipsed by the State, the new agent of absolute cruelty.”
253

Alas it is not only the structures of “back then” but also those of “here now” that possess
cannibalistic qualities. In Corpus , JeanLuc Nancy suggests that our age may be
characterized, or summarized, under the sign of concentration both of minds and of
bodies. “For the first time in history, the modern era has brought us into the presence –
the obsessive, oppressive presence – of the population of the world.”
254

With the freedoms of living in a postmodern world—gender identity, bodily appearance,
sexual orientation, et al are no longer as rigid as they once were—comes a sense of
fracture. We live with a sense of slight excitement, composing ourselves patiently
toward fulfilling the promise of living not too intensely the good life of what Slavoj
Zizek might call a decaffeinated sublime (“Is having sex with a condom not the same as
252
Rousseau as quoted in Catalin Avramescu, An Intellectual History of Cannibalism .
(trans: Alistair Ian Blyth). (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 256.
253

254
JeanLuc Nancy, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 18.
130

taking a shower with a raincoat?”, he wonders).”

In manufacturing parts of the self
255
are we not also consuming parts of ourselves?

Lauren Berlant writes: “For the first time in the history of the world there are as many
overfed as underfed people, and for the first time in the history of the world the overfed
are no longer the wealthiest… it is specifically the bodies of U.S. workingclass and
subproletarian populations that fray slowly…(the United States) continues to emaciate
drastically the land and the bodies of our food producers to the south, in Mexico and
South America, as well as in Africa and rural China. These inversions are more than an
irony or a paradox. Each is distinguished by its own trajectory of slow death.”
256257

Cannibalistic urges persist and erupt in various manifestations, ranging from the
collective—colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism, for example, can all be seen as
forms of cannibalism—to the smaller scale (e.g., gossip as a form of social cannibalism).
To this end Eli Sagan reminds us, “Likewise, an adult who practices and votes racism is
not a cannibal, but there is something of cannibalism incorporated and sublimated in his
actions.”

And Akira Lippit, one last time: “While Africans have borne the burden of
258
255

256

257

258
Eli Sagan, Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (New York: Harper
& Row, 1974), 121.
131

the cannibal image, it is, in truth, the white Europeans who were feared by the Africans
(and later by AfricanAmericans) as cannibals.”
259

The following interlude may appear to be a digression; however, the concept of moral
turpitude forms a terrible kind of parallel, or perhaps a second epilogue, to that of the
cannibalism(s) discussed in this dissertation. Living, in the age of “stand your ground”,
as we are, one wonders what the contemporary cannibals, hiding amongst us in plain
sight, and how they are being conjured and marginalized and to what end. Moral
turpitude” is a legal term historically most often evoked in immigration cases, the
capaciousness of the term has enabled its inconsistent enforcement in historical moments
when the U.S. state has sought to define exceptional threats. From the Latin turpis,
meaning “ugly, foul or disgraceful” , the most commonly understood definition of moral
turpitude is as an “act of baseness, vileness or depravity… Act or behavior that gravely
violates moral sentiment or accepted moral standards of community and is a morally
culpable quality held to be present in some criminal offenses as distinguished from
others.”

The terribly vague definition of moral turpitude as a “base or shameful
260
character” underscores how the raced and gendered and sexed boundaries of “propriety”
continue to define and delimit national inclusion.

Like an ancestor to stand your
261
259
Akira Lippit, “The Infinite Series: Fathers, Cannibals, Chemists…” Criticism ,
Summer 1996, Vol. XXXVIII, No.3, 362.
260

261
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: University Press, 1985), 505. The earliest usage
cited is 1417. Black’s Law Dictionary cites the OED definition and extends it. (Black’s
typically serves as the primary source for legal definitions): Bryan A. Garner, ed.,
“Moral Turpitude” in Black’s Law Dictionary , 7
th
edition (St. Paul, Minn., West Group,
1999), 1026.
132

ground…Conviction of a crime of moral turpitude can be used to impeach a witness,
deprive a worker of the right to hold a license, bar an immigrant, or deport a lawful
permanent resident from the United States. These convictions are almost always lobbed
against dark bodies.
262

In Formations of the Secular , Scholar Talal Asad notes elsewhere that liberal valuations
of consistency between the law and “prevailing morality” take exactly their opposite
form in a colonial context; in fact, this is one of the operations of coloniality as such.
263
He argues that “it is the power to make a strategic separation between law and morality
that defines the colonial situation, because it is this separation that enables the legal work
of educating subjects into a new public morality.”

If, according to Asad, European
264
colonialism separated law from morality in order to produce selfregulating colonized
subjects, then U.S. history suggests that the xenophobic nationstate performs a similar
operation in reverse.

By conflating rather than separating morality from legality, moral turpitude clauses
define public morality through a statutory deployment of indefinition that less
disciplines subjects than expels them in a kind of chewing up, swallowing, and spitting
out again. In the present day, when nearly every taboo has been exhumed, unpacked and
dismissed, the cannibal still manages to shock and to horrify. The bodies that are being
262

263

264
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Cultural
Memory in the Present) , (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 240.
133

eaten through moral turpitude among countless other archaic systems, insidious and
forthright, deserve no less attention.

This dissertation’s intervention in cannibalism is of course also an intervention with
cannibalism. There are many versions of viewing the ecstatic and intolerable, many
versions of jouissance, and many ways to understand violence as limit, and eating, food,
as baseline. We never really eat alone. Taking an anamorphic view of these concepts and
their meaning in the world allows a unification of all sorts of things under the rubric of
cannibalism.

Cannibalism may be mostly gone but surely it will emerge again if and when (more)
things go (more) awry. This kind of presencebutabsence still haunts us today, for
cannibalism is:

”… like the pomegranate seed which the god Hades, by means of a ruse, got Kore to
swallow before she was released from the realm of the underworld so that the earth once
again could begin to germinate. The seed, which is indigestible, is a reminder of the
ancient connection between fertility and the powers of darkness.”

134

  Bibliography

Abraham, Nicolas and Torok, Maria. “‘The Lost Object—Me’: Notes on Endocryptic
Identifcation in The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, Volume 1 , ed.
Nicholas T. Rand (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1994).

Alayarian, Aida. Trauma, Torture and Dissociation: A Psychoanalytic View , (London:
Karnac Books, 2011).

Aoyama, Tomoko. Reading Food in Modern Japanese Literature (Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press, 2008).

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity , (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003).

Avramescu, Catalin. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism . (trans: Alistair Ian Blyth).
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

Bellamy, Jason and Ed Howard, “The Conversations: Trouble Every Day ” Slant
Magazine , Oct 2009.

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations , trans. Harry Zohn. Schoken Books Inc, 1950).

Berlant, Lauren. “Cruel Optimism” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010).

Beugnet, Martine. “Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression”
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007).

Bhabba, Homi K. “The Other Question: the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse” in
Visual Culture: The Reader . (London: Sage Publications, 1999).
Birnbaum, Daniel & Anders Olsson, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs: An Essay on Melancholy
and Cannibalism , trans. Brian Manning Delaney (New York: Sternberg Press, 2008).

Birnbaum, Daniel and Olsson, Anders. “An Interview with Jacques Derrida on The
Limits of Digestion”, eflux , 2009.

Burch, Noel. Theory of Film Practice , (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969).

Clewell, Tammy. “Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss”,
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association , vol. 52 (March 2004).
135

Columbus, Christopher. “Letter to the Sovereigns of 4 March 1493.” Quoted in
Kimberle S. Lopez, “Eros and Colonization: Homosexual Colonial Desire and the
Gendered Rhetoric of Conquest in Herminio Martinez’s “Diario Maldito de Nuno
Guzman.” Chasqui, Vol. 30, No. 1, May 2001.

Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the
Nineteenth Century . (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990).

De Castro, Eduardo Viveiros. Cannibal Metaphysics , (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2014).

De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics , Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1984).

De Montaigne, Michel. “Of Cannibals” in Reading About the World, Volume 2 , ed. Paul
Brians et al (Pullman: Harcourt Brace Custom Books, 1998).

Denis, Claire and JeanPol Fargeau, Trouble Every Day , DVD. Directed by Claire Denis.
France: Rezo Films, 2001.

Derrida, Jacques. The Politics of Friendship , trans. George Collins (London: Verso,
1997).

Derrida, Jacques. Memories: for Paul de Man (New York: Columbia University Press,
1986).

Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation , ed.
Christie McDonald, trans. Peggy Kamuf and Avital Ronell (Omaha: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988).

Deutscher, Penelope. “Mourning the Other, Cultural Cannibalism and the Politics of
Friendship” in Differences: a Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 10.3, (1998).

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (19141916): On the History of the
PsychoAnalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works , ed. James
Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976).

Freud, Sigmund. “On Narcissism: An Introduction” in The Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (19141916): On the
History of the PsychoAnalytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works ,
ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1976).

136

Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis , (New York: Horace
Liveright Press, 1920).

Fuss, Diana. (ed). Inside Out . (New York: Routledge, 1991).

Fuss, Diana. Identification Papers . (New York: Routledge, 1995).

Garner, Bryan A. ed., “Moral Turpitude” in Black’s Law Dictionary , 7
th
edition (St. Paul,
Minn., West Group, 1999).

Goldberg, Jonathan. Reclaiming Sodom . (London: Routledge, 1994).
Greer, Germaine. “Three’s a Crowd.” The Guardian . May 23, 2008.
www.theguardian.com/books/2008/may/24/francoistruffaut.worldcinema

Hall, Kim. Things of Darkness . (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

Hall, Stuart. “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Modernity: An
Introduction to Modern Societies (Hoboken: Wiley Press, 1996).

Hayward, Susan. “The City as Narrative: Corporeal Paris in Contemporary French
Cinema (1950s1990s) in Spaces in European Cinema, ed. Myrto Konstantarakos.
(Portland: Intellect Press, 2000).

Highmore, Ben. “Bitter After Taste: Affect, Food and Social Aesthetics” in Affect
Studies Reader , (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

Holland, SP. “On the Visceral” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies . Duke
University Press Volume 20, no. 4, December 2014.

Hulme, Peter. The Cannibal Scene” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World , eds Francis
Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen, (London: Cambridge University Press,
1998).
Insdorf, Annette. Francois Truffaut , (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).

JeanLuc Nancy, Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

Johnson, Randal and Stam, Robert, eds. Brazilian Cinema (Austin: University of Texas,
1988).

Kilgour, Maggie. “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time” in Cannibalism
and the Colonial World ed Barker, Hulme & Iversen, (London: Cambridge University
Press, 1998).

137

Kilgour, Maggie. From communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of
incorporation   (New York: Routledge, 1990).

Kristeva, Julia. “On the Melancholic Imaginary” in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and
Literature, Ed. Shlomith RimmonKenan (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1987).

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1989.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection . (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982).

Kristeva, Julia. Proust and the Sense of Time , (New York: Columbia University Press,
1993).

Lippit, Akira Mizuta. “The Infinite Series: Fathers, Cannibals, Chemists…” Criticism ,
Summer 1996, Vol. XXXVIII, No.3.

Lopez, Kimberle S. “Eros and Colonization: Homosexual Colonial Desire and the
Gendered Rhetoric of Conquest in Herminio Martinez’s “Diario Maldito de Nuno
Guzman.” Chasqui, Vol. 30, No. 1, May 2001.

Mitsuda, Kristi. “Too Close for Comfort” Reverse Shot , 2009.

Morrey, Douglas. “Open Wounds: Body and Image in JeanLuc Nancy and Claire
Denis”, FilmPhilosophy , vol. 12, no.1.

Nancy, JeanLuc L’Intrus 84 , no. 56, (1948).

Nancy, JeanLuc. “Icon of Fury: Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day ”, trans. Douglas
Morrey. FilmPhilosophy , vol. 12, no.1.
Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: University Press, 1985).

PalenciaRoth, Michael. “The Cannibal Law of 1503,” in Early Images of the Americas:
Transfer and Invention , eds Jerry M. Williams and Robert E. Lewis. (Tucson and
London: University of Arizona Press, 1993).

Pereira dos Santos, Nelson and Mauro, Humberto, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman .
DVD. Director: Nelso Pereira dos Santos. Brazil: 1973.

Picabia, Francis . Manifeste cannibale dada . Paris, 27 March 1920.

Pick, Zuzanna M. The New Latin American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas, 1993).

138

Probyn, Elspeth. “Writing Shame,” in The Affect Theory Reader (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2010).

Probyn, Elspeth. Carnal Appetites (London: Routledge, 2000).

Rickey, Carrie. “Jules and Jim,” Dissolve , no. 543 (February 2014).
https://thedissolve.com/reviews/543julesandjim/

Rocha, Glauber. “An Esthetic of Hunger,” in New Latin American Cinema . Ed. Michael
T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997).

Rudolph, Chuck. “Jules and Jim.” Slant Magazine . May 30, 2005.
http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/review/julesandjim

Sagan, Eli. Cannibalism: Human Aggression and Cultural Form (New York: Harper &
Row, 1974).

SanchezPardo, Esther. Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist
Melancholia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).

Sanday, Peggy Reaves. Divine Hunger   (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Sandoval, Chela. Methodology of the Oppressed . (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991).

Seigworth, Gregory and Gregg, Melissa. “An Inventory of Shimmers” in Affect Studies
Reader , (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).

Serre, Henri. Jules et Jim . DVD. Directed by Francois Truffaut. France, Cinedis, 1962.

Silverman, Kaja. Flesh of My Flesh   (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2009).

Sontag, Susan. “The Image World” in Regarding the Pain of Others . (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2003).

Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression . (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1986).

Sukhdev Sandhu. “Film as an act of Love”, www.newstatesman.com , April 2, 2009.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “On the Visceral” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay
Studies . Duke University Press Volume 20, no. 4, December 2014.

Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion (New York: NYU Press, 2012).

139

Tongson, Karen. Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York
University Press, 2011).

Truffaut, Francois. Interviews . Ed. Ronald Bergin. (Jackson: University of Mississippi
Press, 2008).

Walkington, Thomas. The Optick Glasse of Humors . 1631.

140

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets