Eating the Other: Levinas's Ethical Encounter

Abstract

This book is the story of my journey with Emmanuel Levinas on a dystopic path to the ethical encounter. For the journey, I agree to be Levinas’s human subject, to encounter his “other”. And he agrees to traverse a path through my world, a world of food and eating. To ready me for the encounter, Levinas tells me the story of his ethics, narratively (we ‘journey’ through it), and so my book is unavoidably ‘story’ too. To preface, then: The ethical encounter is a “face to face” encounter between a “human” subject (me) and an “other” (TI:39). In my encountering the other face to face in the world of food, food production and eating, Levinas tells the story of the violences of my existence—of my ‘eating’ of the world at the expense of the other. Face to face with the other, I cannot avoid my responsibility for the needs and suffering of the other. In “proximity” with the other, I am guilty for eating; in proximity, I respond by giving the other “bread from [my] mouth” (OB:100). In the first four chapters of the journey, I am hungry, and Levinas leads me through scenes replete with food and eating. Some of these scenes Levinas had intended to show me, and some he did not; some scenes I show him (I have, after all, asked him into my world). At first, he shows me how this world can satiate my needs, but how it will, inevitably and inextricably, leave me, a not-yet ethical human subject, vulnerable and exposed. So Levinas and I enter scenes that help me avoid exposure: Industrialised production and destruction of animals for food and its sequelae of familiar and dependable home-cooked meals, both temporally and temporarily, secure me from feeling anxious in the world. But, with security, my enjoyment loses its exciting edge. In chapters five and six, Levinas takes me to the space where the ethical encounter is meant to take place; and he has readied me through vivid story to feel guilty—I am ready now to give the bread from my mouth to the other. But there is no other here for me to encounter. I confront Levinas; I ask him to think beyond the security of his own ethical space. I suggest that perhaps the spatial strategies he has shown me to avoid the threats of the world have now all but voided that world itself—voided the possibility of my encountering (any) other(s). It is here that I leave Levinas, in the silence he offered me in reply, and I walk alone into the final two chapters. I argue (with whom, for there are no others?) that, perhaps, the world around me is a hyper-secured space that refuses to regard the boundaries that Levinas sets upon it. I argue that this space has been voided of responsibility, and I ask: What are the consequences? This final question draws me back (albeit facing in a different direction from that in which I began), to eating. I suggest that all Levinas and I have been through on this journey—avoiding the consequences of my eating the world, avoiding my guilt and responsibility, avoiding a world voided of guilt and responsibility—all this can be avoided: We can avoid avoidance, and eat it too. And what will this mean? To the thesis, then…