Foucault and Theology by Tran Jonathan;

Author:Tran, Jonathan;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Self-Care: The Case of Animals

Knowing oneself is the capacity for placing-oneself-in-the-world.

—Stanley Cavell

Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent book Eating Animals contends that the eating habits of late capitalism produce a culture increasingly unable to see animal life, a fitting appraisal given our depiction of Empire in Chapter 2. What is particularly striking in Safran Foer’s portrayal is the way eating can encourage fidelity by engendering a certain kind of attentiveness, without which eating portends in the opposite direction, blindness, or what the J. M. Coetzee character Elizabeth Costello calls “willed ignorance,” the sustained effort to render invisible the frighteningly cruel processes of animal production. Stanley Hauerwas has coyly stated that capitalism produces shitty people; we might extend that to the observation that capitalism produces shitty people who produce shitty foods that produce shitty people.1 The question becomes, quite literally in the case of factory farming, is there any way out of the shit?

Seeking after new forms of subjectivity within such a context is quite likely, for Michel Foucault, to take the form of suicide. The capitalist strictures that produce shitty persons are astoundingly formidable. Sometimes the freedom most available amidst these pressures is the freedom to die by one’s own hand. Because biopower seeks to determine how we live (through inducements like how we eat) resistance may resemble death. Thus Foucault announced, “I’m in favor of a true cultural combat in order to teach people again that there is no conduct that is more beautiful, that, consequently, deserves to be considered with as much attention as suicide. One should work on one’s suicide all one’s life.”2

In this chapter I interpret what Arnold Davidson refers to as “one of Foucault’s most disquieting acclimations” as his greatest proximity to Christianity, which Hauerwas has called “extended training in how to die early.” That Hauerwas likens early death to “dying well” indicates that Christianity’s attempt to return subjectivity to God cannot help but sound strange. That Foucault considered suicide a form of self-care indicates the totalizing world of late capitalism. Davidson comments, “If counter-conduct at the end of life can be decisively shocking, we should not underestimate its more everyday occasions.”3 I speak in the following of one such occasion, the everyday practice of eating, and eating as an occasion for self-care that may resemble cultural death within an ethos consumed with consuming. The chapter positions itself both sympathetic to Safran Foer’s concern for animal welfare but suspicious of his rather naïve, given the totalizing burdens of Empire, presumptions about the ethical benefits of vegetarianism. In contrast to what will be considered a mythic vegetarianism (recall the repressive hypothesis), I suggest that the moral good of not eating meat has less to do with making things better for animals (though that is not without consideration) than the attempt to gain some purchase on one’s humanity, to care for oneself within morally damaging capitalist economies, and to not be consumed, one might say, by consuming.

The argument here turns on a recent conversation between philosophers Cora Diamond

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