“The idea of incorporation, upon which I will be focusing, depends upon and enforces an absolute division between inside and outside; but in the act itself that opposition disappears, dissolving the structure it appears to produce” (Kilgour 4).
“In terms of this opposition it is usually, as Freud suggests (with important exceptions I will consider), the inside that appears as the superior, as the literally central term. The outside is considered secondary, extraneous—and yet ultimately threatening” (Kilgour 4-5).
“at the basis of the dualism is a nostalgia for total unity and oneness” (5).
“But bodily needs also indicate that the appearance of autonomy is an illusion, for the body must incorporate elements from outside itself in order to survive. The need for food exposes the vulnerability of individual identity, enacted at a wider social level in the need for exchanges, communion, and commerce with others, through which the individual is absorbed into a larger corporate body” (Kilgour 6).
“‘Man’ is fed ‘at the world’s expense’; the relation between the two terms is not one of reciprocity but one of total opposition, as the eater is not himself in turn eaten but secures his own identity by absorbing the world outside himself” (Kilgour 6-7).
“As Bakhtin himself notes, one of the most important characteristics of eating is its ambivalence: it is the most material need yet it invested with a great deal of significance, an act that involves both desire and aggression” (Kilgour 7).
“in the struggle between desire and aggression, between identification and the division that creates power over another, a struggle which if finally that between communion and cannibalism, cannibalism has usually won. As I hope to show, one product of that victory is the identity of the modern subject or individual who desires to eat without in turn being eaten” (Kilgour 7).
“In French, to consume and to consummate are the same word . . . Like eating, intercourse makes two bodies one, though in a union that is fortunately less absolute and permanent” (Kilgour 7).
“But the fact that sex is an incomplete act of incorporation may be seen as intensifying desire to the point where it becomes transformed into not art but aggression” (Kilgour 8).
“Reading is therefore eating, an act of consumption” (Kilgour 9).
“To imagine knowledge as tasting or eating is to set up an epistemology in which subject and object are strictly differentiated and yet finally totally identified” (Kilgour 9).
“As our most basic need, eating, physical tasting, reveals the fallaciousness of the illusion of self-sufficiency and autonomy that the inside/outside opposition tries to uphold by constructing firm boundary lines between ourselves and the world. The inside depends upon, is nourished or harmed by, substances that come from outside. The identification of aesthetic taste, taste in a ‘higher’ form purified of its bodily origins, which choice is one tactic is one tactic of guarding against the vulnerability involved in receiving nourishment and gifts from outside the private property of the individual body” (10).
“When the canny becomes completely uncanny the result is the gothic, but even in less extreme cases a metaphoric meaning is an alien meaning and, like all aliens, potentially threatens the system it infiltrates” (12).
“There is a long tradition of suspecting metaphor and of identifying it with deceit and duplicity. It is a basically dualistic trope that depends upon a difference between is inside and outside, its literal and figurative meaning; ‘antimetaphorical’ positions dream of abolishing this duality in order to return to a proper literal meaning” (12).
“A distrust of metaphor is implicit in stances that privilege unity over diversity—especially when it is reduced to duality—and that describe the relation between thought and language as essentially one of essence and appearance, in which appearances are read as misleading cloaks that hide an inside truth” (12).
“However, as it brings opposites together, metaphor itself can be read antithetically, as a source of both alienation and identification, which enacts either the estrangement of the familiar or the familiarization of the strange” (13).
“Metaphor, the trope by which opposites—guest and host, body and mind, food and words—meet, is a means of incorporation that subverts normal definitions of identity. It is the revolutionary trope Northrop Frye sees . . .” (13).
“While from one perspective metaphor alienates, from another it unites and brings about an apocalyptic ending of alienation and the re-membering of an original unity. For Derrida therefore, descriptions of metaphor themselves are based also on a pattern of fall and return that involves an original alienation of a proper meaning followed by its reappropriation and restoration to self-identity” (13).
“What Derrida suggests is that the traditional reading of metaphor as a form of linguistic transgression is in fact a reassuring version of a felix culpa. Estrangement is seen as a carefully controlled and ordered preliminary stage, a necessary detour of meaning, that leads to and even guarantees a total recovery of loss through an ascent to a higher level of meaning” (13).
“To incorporate the alien in these instances is to admit poison into the body: the dualism of eater/eaten is not transcended or sublimated through internalization, but perpetuated” (13).
“However, communion sets up a more complicated system of relation in which it becomes difficult to say precisely who is eating whom” (15).
“The act is one of reciprocal incorporation, as both are identified by the single word and substance, the Host, so that the absolute boundary between inside and outside, eater and eaten, itself appears to disappear” (15).
“Originally, it appears to have been one of what Freud, following Karl Abel, describes as primal words that unite antithetical meaning” (15).
“while in Latin hospes originally meant both host and guest” (15).
“Those who share food together are particularly felt to be united through participation in a common substance” (15-16).
“For J. Hillis Miller, who imagines ‘The Critic as Host,’ the way to avoid critical cannibalism is to read the text as the lost third term, ‘that ambiguous gift, food, host in the sense of victim, sacrifice,’ which is ‘broken, divided, passed around, consumed by the critics’” (16).
“According to Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, cannibalism is the ultimate ‘antimetaphor’: whereas metaphors put the mouth into words, anitmetaphors put words (in the form of textual figures) into mouths. It is obviously the most demonic image for the impulse to incorporate external reality and get everything inside a single body, be it physical, textual, or social” (16).
“My own schema would suggest that the relation between the two is one of ‘sublimation,’ in which the higher is a superior, more refined because mental or internalized version of the lower, which is more basic and materialistic because still rooted in the external body” (16).
“Sublimation is therefore a central tactic of logocentric thinking, in which differences are set up in order to be synthesized. Furthermore, Peggy Reeves Sanday, an anthropologist who has written recently on literal cannibalism, draws an interesting if unsettling analogy between alchemical sublimation and cannibalism, noting that both are symbolic systems which attempt to make matter significant” (17).
“as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White note, ‘the main mechanism whereby a group or class or individual bids for symbolic superiority over others: sublimation is inseparable from strategies of cultural domination.’ It has the great advantage over cannibalism, moreover, in that it, like certain other strategies of domination, can claim to subsume the other for the other’s own good” (17).
“As I tried to illustrate in my first citation, notes are a wonderful means of incorporation. Perhaps they are our most useful model for a benign way of including without consuming” (19).
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