Eat to Live or Live to Eat: Metaphor and Truth
Journal Title: NETSOL: New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences - Year 2019, Vol 4, Issue 2
Abstract
Does the act of eating literally precede the birth of language as metaphor for knowing the truth? Can we think of a language that talks about food without thinking of food as the basis of human languages? Is there a truth to eating outside the discourse of language as the idealized representation of the human condition? Are we ever thinking of anything apart from food? Or, are we thinking at all when we are not thinking of eating? If the structure of our thinking is about food, to think of something other than food is to turn language into a shibboleth without a material basis to it. To think of eating in opposition to thinking where you do not have to talk about eating is to privilege the mind over the body. Food is the substructure to the superstructure of thought; to eat is to take arms against a sea of ideals; more importantly, it is to root our understanding of metaphor within a politics of eating; it is to look for truth in whether someone has eaten or not eaten playing a determining role in the formation of ideas about the world. Writing and popular culture have one thing in common which is that they must balance the demands that eating will make in the assertion of one’s humanity with the ideas about humanity that perhaps have little to do with the activity of eating. This paper argues that in the acknowledgment of eating as central to any notion of the truth, we make food interchangeable with how we ingest a metaphor so much so that we are left wondering why there are people who go to sleep on empty stomachs!
Authors and Affiliations
Prakash Kona
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP671219
- DOI 10.24819/netsol2019.07
- Views 108
- Downloads 0
Holding Out for a Hero: Celebrity Politics in the Neoliberal Age
This article argues that the advent of the celebrity politician can be understood as a consequence of the rise of neoliberalism, a political and economic project that foregrounds the importance of individual autonomy as...
Book Review: Sean McMeekin. The Russian Revolution: A New History. New York: Basic Books, 2017
The Russian Revolution: A New History is a very detailed narrative of what can be regarded as one of the most influential events in the twentieth century that reflects on the political, social, and military history of Ru...
Discovering the Plan behind the Gordian Knot New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences
At the beginning of December 2015, Dr. Tamer Balcı, one of the founding editors for New Trends in Social and Liberal Sciences, asked me to “write an essay or a welcome message indicating the significance of interdiscipli...
Understanding the Dynamics of Turkish Nationalism
Many scholars have analyzed Turkish nationalism to understand its progress in the Turkish Republic from different perspectives. While some scholars have forefronted the importance of cultural and religious aspects of Tur...
Book Review: Górny, Grzegorz, Janusz Rosikoń and Stan Kacsprzak, Guadalupe Mysteries: Deciphering the Code, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2016
Author-photographer duo Grzegorz Górny and Rosikoń Janusz in Guadalupe Mysteries: Deciphering the Code, thoroughly examine the Guadalupe tilma (cloak) in terms of its chronology, and political relevance in national ide...