Subject: [HAB:] cannibalism and discourse ethics
Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 23:01:57 -0600



Wow, I never thought there would be an opportunity to write about so many of
my theoretical interests together: Habermas, evil, death, and food. I teach
a course on food and religion which covers cannibalism, I also include it in
a section in World Religions... and I teach a course on Death discussing the
eating of corpses as part of funeral and mortuary rituals...

With my interest intact, I'm not sure this is much of a problem for
discourse ethics, no more than sado-masochism is. One of the main tenets of
discourse ethics is recprocity, and reciprocity is terminated (at some
point) in the process of anthropophagy / consumption. Perhaps certain body
parts could be mutually shared at the table without really becoming a moral
issue - but at some point reciprocity would end as you broached the question
of certain organs that one really can't do without. [Please note, my example
here is hypothetical.] This is where the context-transcending aspect of
discourse ethics could shed line on the otherwise rather intimate culinary
encounter. Discourse ethics appreciates the fragilty of life and discourse
with its utopian dimension. Reciprocity is not something that can actually
be achieved (Habermas notes that self-transparency in discourse is
impossible) but is part of an ever expanding process of mutual illumination.
To deliberately foreclose upon this would be, essentially, to agree upon the
suicide (if we can use that term) of a member of the communicative
community. The technical hitch being that even if death is a foreseable
consequence of the action taken, and there is group recognition of this,
death itself cannot be fully appreciated or understood without pathology if
we consistenly apply the principle of discourse. We cannot have knowledge of
'the after.' Because it is a mystery, we cannot anticipate the 'real'
consequences and therefore it is not a candidate for discursive
clarification.

However, even if one can opt out of a specific discourse, one cannot opt out
of discourse altogether: Habermas is explicit about permanent refusals:
madness, schizophrenia, suicide. In terms of the possibility of "consensual
cannibalism" I don't really see any way around this conclusion - in theory
it is simply not a candidate for a practical discourse (we can, in
principle, rule out moral norms as candidates for validity that would
contradict or render moral norms irrelevant). Claims to systematic
distortion aside, a discourse ethics is fundamentally life-affirming in all
respects - and reciprocity is the condition of its possibility. This means
that *any* action taken by participants within a communicative community
that entail the voluntary termination, or even might bring about the
potential termination of certain members, would be forbidden. Since the
ideal speech situation is not a bus stop, its correlative critical theory
would likely only explicate the pathologies of any kind of subjectivity that
saw death as a desirable outcome but also be critical of situations that
require strategic actions due to various forms of power or authority
existent. On the idea of death being desirable: it is inconceivable that
discourse ethics could agree or support this example as valid, drawn from
Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, "We'll be fine. In case the war doesn't go
our way Hitler has prepared a nice death for us all" (a statement utterly
incomprehensible without some conception of pathology). I should note, I
believe that euthanasia is a separate issue, since euthanasia is most often
an issue only for chronic and terminal illnesses and therefore has a
different dynamic and context than mutual cannibalism.

To express some reservations: I'm not sure if discourse ethics is able to
accommodate the 'ethics' of the suicide bomber, the volunteer dinner-guest,
or the hard-to-understand "I'm trying to hit bottom" (Fight Club). The
diminishment of any form of communicative life is in principle prohibited
... although in practical terms strategic actions are often used as attempts
to re-initiate communicative patterns that have broken down. This is, I
think, a very strange limitation of discourse ethics (its fundamental
affirmation of human life - PRIOR to an adequate definition of that very
life). The practice of agreed upon cannibalism cannot be anything but
immoral. However, mortuary cannibalism could probably pass without much of a
problem. There is no reason, hypothetically, why we should bury, cremate,
seal in plastic, skybury, or dissolve the dead rather than eat them (I can't
think of any other forms of ritual disposal of the body...). So, we can have
our cannibalism and our discourse ethics.

Other examples, however, should give us some pause to consider the relevance
of immorality for our society.

Certainly immoral people are not individuals that we can model ourselves
after, nor emmulate or even hold up as good persons. Immoral people are in
fact and in principle evil (to put it crudely). Is not the martyr who offers
themself up as a sacrifice to an idea to be considered immoral from within
the reasoning discourse of a discerning moral theory? But is this all that
there is to say? The martyr *can* bring about peace. Buddhists monks setting
themselves ablaze... these actions contain potentially explosive results -
empathy, compassion, forgiveness... and yet they cannot be sanctioned as
"moral." They must remain forbidden.

The transformative effects of "sacrifice" cannot be predicted nor
sanctioned, but the power of tragedy or violence or the symbolic
explosiveness of ritual or expressive actions cannot be ignored or washed
off as simply being "immoral" or "irrational" - something that we should not
pay attention to --> because they stand at the limits of communicative
action, utterly contradicting the possibility of reciprocity but at the same
time saying something in a way that could not be said otherwise... in many
respects it is the senselessness of the sacrifice (is that the right word?)
that lends itself to dramatic self and communal transformation. The film The
Life of David Gale is an example of just this (I didn't like the film, but
there it is). Human beings, it is said, can aspire to compassion and perhaps
even sacrifice (ripping this material off from Lacan). Sacrifice cannot be
repeated though... that's the paradoxical message of such destruction.

And again, we can't just avert our eyes and turn toward our round-table
consensus-making smug better than thou democratic institutions. It isn't
that simple. Such "evil beings" provide opportunities through their actions
to transform communities - and again, I MUST stress this, such people ARE
evil... I should also stress that I am NOT developing a functionalist
understanding of evil (evil as necessary for the development of good, blah,
that's HORRIBLE). There is no necessary relation between evil and
transformation, hence immorality cannot play a determined function... but we
do have to think about this further. As a social formation, our society is
structurally open to transformation by symbolic gestures... of which I
believe we've had in recent years. These examples need to be thought about
further, precisely because they cannot be accommodated by a communicative
ethics.

Hmmm.... not as much about cannibalism there as I would like. Cannibalism is
rarely practiced for reasons of nutrition. If people are looking to eat
people for lack of other available food... what can I say - to hell with
discourse ethics, grab a spear!

Thanks to Victor for sending this.

ken



     --- from list habermas-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---