Acerca del autor

C?t?lin Avramescu is reader in political science at the University of Bucharest and a docent in philosophy at the University of Helsinki.

De la contraportada

"In intellectual history, cannibals stand for alien and exotic human beings, specimens of our species who realize its darkest possibilities, usually in places far removed from civilization. Cannibalism both expresses natural law and contravenes it. Avramescu's book is a tour de force. It explains not only why the figure of the cannibal used to be ubiquitous in moral philosophy, but why it has become extinct."--Tom Sorell, University of Birmingham

"In this brilliant book, Catalin Avramescu reexamines the Western tradition of social and political thought, restoring our obsession with cannibalism to its proper place in the European imagination. His erudition is overwhelming as he traces the figure of the cannibal, both fascinating and horrifying, through the period when the modern world was being born. Avramescu shows us our history and ourselves in a completely original and gripping way. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is a real tour de force."--Daniel Garber, Princeton University

"Avramescu's wonderful study treats the cannibal as a scholarly creature who animates theoretical texts. Avramescu provides his readers with a comprehensive view of the various theories and visions of cannibalism. There is no book quite like this. Cannibalism is at the extreme limit of human thought and language. Avramescu allows us to see why, and he does it very well."--Timo Airaksinen, author of The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sade

"This is a splendid book. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism is a persuasive study of European ideas about cannibalism in relation to theories of natural law and the state of nature. Avramescu defends an original thesis about the site of absolute cruelty in political philosophies of early modern and modern societies. His historical knowledge is stunning. His interpretations are always sober and convincing/"--Thomas Pavel, University of Chicago

"A very exciting and original contribution to our understanding of various approaches to cannibalism from the viewpoint of intellectual history. An Intellectual History of Cannibalism adds significantly to our grasp of the nature of evil and its tortuous itineraries within modern civilization. Avramescu offers us a provocative, challenging book on a topic that bears upon the political and moral catastrophes of modern times."--Vladimir Tismaneanu, University of Maryland

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An Intellectual History of Cannibalism

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

List of Illustrations.............................................viiAcknowledgments...................................................ixChapter One A Hobbesian Life Raft.................................4Chapter Two The Tortures and Fate of the Body.....................41Chapter Three Creatures of Evil...................................70Chapter Four The Conquest of the Savages..........................105Chapter Five The Predicaments of Identity.........................125Chapter Six A Question of Taste...................................162Chapter Seven The Anthropophagus in the City......................183Chapter Eight The Agent of Absolute Cruelty.......................233Notes.............................................................263Selected Bibliography.............................................317Index.............................................................333

Chapter One

THE THEATER OF NATURAL LAW

In what is perhaps the most concise and most ignored characterization of his scientific method, Thomas Hobbes argues in Leviathan (1651) that "examples prove nothing." What Hobbes is signaling here is a profound difference, in nature rather than style, between the political science whose inventor he had declared himself to be in De cive (1642) and the moral philosophy of his predecessors. As early as 1630, Hobbes had elaborated the idea of a human science understood as one that was universal and rational, modeled according to the principles of Euclidean geometry. This is a science of rational deductions, systematically and logically drawn from a number of axioms. It does not wholly dispense with experience, but rather reduces it to a restricted set of observations that admit no contradiction, such as the observation that men fear each other. The necessity of this new branch of science is, for Hobbes, dual. On the one hand, it flows from the nature of the body politic, which is an artificial construct, resulting from the will of individuals. This means that it is not a part of nature and cannot be deduced based on the natural sentiments of sociability. Hence political science must set out from definitions rather than empirical facts. On the other hand, the deductive science of man and of the body politic is opposed to an idea of political discourse that Hobbes regards as profoundly suspect, namely the tradition of "rhetoric," a term whereby he includes ancient philosophy and history, together with their modern interpretations. He sees this science as one of vague or erroneous representations, capable of fostering dissension as regards the most fundamental principles of morality. In contrast with the "rhetoric" of classical authors, Hobbes proposes an axiomatically ordered science, similar to physics and mathematics, a science of universal relevance, in which "examples" at most have the scope of clarifying certain aspects and revealing certain implications of the theory.

Hobbes's idea of science, which has some scholastic antecedents, was particularly influential in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when political philosophers began to cultivate a style of argument that notably distanced itself from the moralists of literary extraction. Spinoza is one of the first to adhere to this doctrine, with a work in which ethics is "demonstrated geometrically" (more geometrico). The list of authors from this period who elaborate abstract works, ostensibly conceived as scientific, is long, and includes names as diverse as Cambridge Platonist Henry More; Richard Cumberland, author of De legibus naturae (1672) and a prominent critic of Hobbes; Francis Hutcheson; and William King. What these thinkers reject is the concept of moral discourse taken as a sum of particular experiences. This is also the moral philosophy here with us today, one where examples have a value which is either negative in essence, that of "falsifying" a general principle, or which is positive only in a marginal, illustrative sense.

Today, against the backdrop of an impoverishment of the moral imagination, it is difficult for us to grasp that, in the seventeenth century, the dominant formula of moral philosophy was nonetheless different. Up to the point when the abstract science of man and of society entered the scene, there had been a number of other sciences for which imagination and example were the primal matter around which discourse was constructed. Even after the new scientific canons are accepted, the rupture between the latter and what we have here designated as the classical style of moral argument is not sudden. Hobbes himself deviates from his own principle. He must have thought that examples, ultimately, prove something, otherwise Leviathan would have been a considerably shorter book. In his writings, as well as in the writings of most other philosophers of the scientific style, there are numerous examples with a moral value. The necessity by virtue of which they are mentioned and discussed is complex.

By the early eighteenth century, one of the major forums for discourse about morals was the science of casuistry. This discipline is a collection of "cases," collated in treatises that group them by categories and discuss them separately, in connection with the relevant authorities. In England it was illustrated by authors like William Perkins (Armilla aurea, 1590), William Ames (De conscientia, 1630), Robert Sanderson (De juramenti promissorii obligatione, 1647), Joseph Hall (Decisions of diverse Practicall Cases of Conscience, 1649), or Jeremy Taylor (Ductor dubitantium, 1660). Casuistry is a science of examples, in which the beginning and end of the research is the particular rather than the general: a "practical" science in the Aristotelian sense of the term. In the epoch during which the modern scientific model is in formation, casuistry is an obligatory interlocutor. Scientific authors write within a space saturated by the conventions and vocabulary of casuistry. Casuistic arguments and influence partly explain why the social philosophy of the eighteenth century is one in which examples remain central to the order of demonstration.

However, more profound is the fact that it is the very nature of the knowledge of man in general that demands examples. It is not too great an exaggeration to say that, for classical and early modern man, "to know" means to imagine, to dispose of a set of adequate images. The juxtaposition of a series of images is what forms the gallery of science, up until the great censorship of the imagination heralded by the conventions of modern science and discourse. Up until that moment, the humanities were organized around ideas that probably originated from the Greek sophists, after which they were systematized by the theory of argumentation and Aristotelian categories, before being handed down by the Skeptics and the tradition of the Roman rhetoricians.

These influences explain why knowledge of the world and of humans ends up being conceived during the Renaissance as a species of theater. The scholar and the reader are seen as spectators who contemplate a show, a "theater of the world" (theatrum mundi). The metaphor of the theater is a model of scientific discourse. The term theater begins to be employed in the titles of works that are summary expositions of vast subjects. Applied knowledge also begins to explore the virtues of theatricality. In the sixteenth century the first "theaters of anatomy" appear in Paris and Leiden, while numerous collections of natural curiosities from the same period are designated "theaters of nature." In the seventeenth century, William Petty says of a "Theatre for Anatomy" that it is "(without Metaphor) a Temple of God." In 1630, Jean-Pierre Camus describes the world as "an amphitheatre soaked in blood." Because evil men outnumber the good, it is necessary to inspire fear and terror in the former by presenting the punishments fixed by law for those who transgress. In The Natural History of Religion, Hume writes: "We are placed in this world, as in a great theatre, where the true springs and causes of every event are entirely concealed from us."

In the eighteenth century, the theater is also the place where the ingeniousness glorified by the new mechanical philosophy finds fertile ground for presentation. Fascinated by the new techniques of miraculous movement, the baroque theatrical producer draws on a series of mechanisms to automate the performance. On the stage, which now begins to be illuminated with artificial light, an allegory of movement in society and the world is performed. In the dialogue A Plurality of Worlds, French philosopher Bernard Fontenelle (1657-1757) is just one of the many authors to compare the curious machines of the theater to those of the universe. The baroque also cultivates a taste for the spectacle of human cruelty and suffering. Pleasure and pain are mutually necessary: there is no pleasure without pain, and any satisfaction is compensated with suffering in the natural order. Something concerning the influence of the theatrical model is also said by the fact that even contestation of the theater, which Jean-Jacques Rousseau will expound in the Lettre à d'Alembert sur les spectacles, is possible only insofar as there is a profound connection between theater and the human nature: "The stage is a tableau of the human passions, whose germ is to be found in all hearts."

A theatrically organized system of images, the science of the baroque is animated by the central passion of curiosity. Aristotle had already remarked, in the Metaphysics, that wonder is the first impulse toward philosophy: "Due to the fact that they have wondered, men now begin, as they have always begun, to philosophize." In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, curiosity is removed from the catalogue of vices and elevated to the rank of primary passion. In The Spectacle of Nature, Noël-Antoine Pluche argues that of all the means that can be employed to teach young people to think "there are none whose effects are more certain and more enduring that curiosity." The spectacle of nature is one that the divinity has particularly intended for the instruction of man. In nature, man has the opportunity and the duty to decipher a providential order. If we content ourselves to observe nature without understanding the plan of the Creator, Pluche believes, we shall be no better than the savage who looks at a clock manufactured in Europe without understanding what use its mechanism serves. "The whole of nature is a magnificent clock whose mechanism functions only in order to teach us something completely different to that which can be observed at first glance."

Curiosity is not merely a passion, but also an object of research. The science of the classical age is, more than any other, a collection of curiosities. Many treatises of the period include in their titles references to "curiosities," highlighting moral and natural philosophy's fascination for the grotesque and bizarre during the Renaissance and the baroque periods.

Up until the eighteenth century, when science succeeds, at least at a conceptual level, in making intelligible and plausible Francis Bacon's ideal of complete mastery of reality, the wider world is viewed through the lens of a system of fundamental oppositions between city and nature. This system of oppositions is epistemologically guided by "dialectics," a science that proceeds by overturning its initial object in order to distinguish its hidden nature and its relation to its opposite in the universal balance of creatures. The dialectical structure of the world commences from the pinnacle of the celestial hierarchy, where God and His monkey, the Devil, are to be found, and continues to the very base of the pyramid of beings.

Thus beyond the boundaries of the premodern city extends an inverted world, the opposite of civilization, peopled by grotesque figures, inverted images of civic man. The boundary of the republic is the symbolic limit whence begins another world, announced by such constructions as the Rabenstein (Ravens' Rock): the scaffold on which the ritual execution of capital punishment took place in German cities, the place where those who broke the laws of man and of nature were killed and their remains were left impaled on pitchforks. This was the limit beyond which evil nature became visible, whence it came and whither it was summoned to return.

The state of nature invoked by the philosophers, prior to being a thought experiment of modern science or a historical hypothesis, is part of this fundamental inversion, a grotesque theater of lawless figures. It is a carnival in which all the hierarchies of civic order dissolve in criminal confusion. Hence the description of the state of nature as a generalized war, a war of all against all, a war in which anything goes.

This is the natural anarchy against whose background the central figure of our narrative takes shape: the anthropophagus. Among the diabolical creatures unleashed by anti-civil freedom, the cannibal is an eminent presence. The idea according to which the absence of supreme power leads to a state of chaos characterized by cannibalism is common. In a seventeenth-century sermon, we learn: "Take Sovereignty from the face of the earth and you turne it into a Cockpit. Men would become cut-throats and Canibals one unto another. We should have a very hell upon earth, and the face of it covered with blood, as it was once with water." In The Right of War and Peace (1625), Hugo Grotius approvingly cites what he claims is a Hebrew proverb: "If there were no Sovereign Power, we should swallow up one another alive." The same idea, he asserts, is also to be found in the writings of Saint John Chrysostom. In Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803 edition), American Indians, who live in a state of nature, are said to war with each other continually, like predatory beasts, killing and eating each other. In the islands of the South Seas, things are even worse: "The state of perpetual hostility, in which the different tribes of these people live with each other, seems to be even more striking than among the savages of any part of America; and their custom of eating human flesh, and even their relish for that kind of food are established beyond a possibility of doubt."

When, in the late eighteenth century, a band of anthropophagous Gypsies horrifies Vienna, we witness one of the last incursions of these extraordinary creatures into the space of civilization, creatures that once populated broad swathes of the geographic imagination. Pigmies or giants, talking birds, tribes with strange customs, Gog and Magog, dog-headed or single-legged people: this is the raw material of the science that lies behind the dissertations about the theater of natural law. It is a species of geography, but in contrast to common physical geography it is sooner a speculative geography, concerned with describing and explaining bizarre inversions beyond the boundaries of common understanding, whence stretch regions in which civilized individuality is doomed to perish.

Of all the inverted species, the cannibal is the object of a veritable fixation. In ancient literature, there are frequent mentions of anthropophagi, from Homer and Strabo to the Roman historians. The most influential accounts were those contained in the Histories of Herodotus. The margins of the world known to the Greek author are peopled with numerous cannibal nations, such as the Mesogetae. When one of them nears the end of his life, his relatives kill him, and then prepare his flesh for a banquet. They reckon such a fate to be the most fortunate and also believe that people who die of illness are not good enough to eat, but only to bury, an eventuality that causes them to mourn. Also in the environs of the Black Sea, when a Scythian warrior slays a foe for the first time, he drinks his blood. The Scythians make their clothes and even the quivers for their arrows from the skin of their enemies, and drinking cups from their skulls. Some flay their victims and stretch the skin over a frame.

In the Middle Ages, the Crusades were an occasion to import extreme images into the European imagination. In a late-twelfth-century chanson de geste, in which the events of the First Crusade are described, the army of the legendary King Tafur, an ally of the Christians, is presented as a mob of barefoot, primitive savages, armed with clubs. The crusaders are astonished to discover that the savages prefer human flesh to that of nightingales stuffed with spices and are fearful that they themselves might be cooked and eaten. Richard the Lionheart is portrayed in some chronicles as a cannibal who gobbles up the flesh of a Saracen at a banquet. In the same period, a chief source of information about nations with strange customs is the book of Marco Polo. In Asia, there are nations that hold marriages between the dead, others that kidnap foreigners and hold them to ransom, while the king of another land goes naked, exactly like his subjects. In the kingdom of Felech, in the island of Java Minor, the natives eat the flesh of all kinds of animals and are by no means adverse to human flesh.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from An Intellectual History of Cannibalismby Catalin Avramescu Copyright © 2003 by Humanitas, Bucharest, Romania. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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