The CSI Guests Seminar will welcome
Annemarie Mol
Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam
Programme group: Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body
to discuss her book
Eating in Theory
Introduction to the discussion by Jean Goizauskas
Back cover: As we taste, chew, swallow, digest, and excrete, our foods transform us, while our eating, in its turn, affects the wider earthly environment. In Eating in Theory Annemarie Mol takes inspiration from these transformative entanglements to rethink what it is to be human. Drawing on fieldwork at food conferences, research labs, health care facilities, restaurants, and her own kitchen table, Mol reassesses the work of authors such as Hannah Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans Jonas, and Emmanuel Levinas. They celebrated the allegedly unique capability of humans to rise above their immediate bodily needs. Mol, by contrast, appreciates that as humans we share our fleshy substance with other living beings, whom we cultivate, cut into pieces, transport, prepare, and incorporate—and to whom we leave our excesses. This has far-reaching philosophical consequences. Taking human eating seriously suggests a reappraisal of being as transformative, knowing as entangling, doing as dispersed, and relating as a matter of inescapable dependence.
Annemarie Mol, Eating in Theory, Duke University Press, 2021.
The Guest Seminar Series is organized collectively by the CSI PhD students. It is open upon registration.
Date: Thursday November 29, 2022, from 11am to 1pm
Venue: Salle Saint Jacques and via videoconference for external audience.
Registration: please fill out this form (the link for the videoconference will be sent by email to the registrants prior to the meeting)
Contact: Jean Goizauskas or Clément Foutrel
Photo source: laap, Les Possédés et leurs mondes, Annemarie Mol. Film 1. « From Natural Sciences to Philosophy and Anthropology », Summer 2021.