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Taste 197 ReembodimentandDiscomfort The triumph of reason in modern Western culture has thus relied, among other complex operations, on the becoming metaphoric of the sensory. In the eighteenth century, the metaphorization of taste from the gustatory to the aesthetic and of tact from the musical to the social was one of the rhetorical tricks that allowed the Enlightenment to produce the universal Man by abstracting his body. Intangible (etymologically, inaccessible to touch), perched high above the vicissitudes of the particular and the social, and therefore better apt to serve as a figurative vessel for a new kind of transcendence , the abstractable body, as both subject and object of reason, became suitable to challenge the soul as the unquestionable justification of the political order. Metaphors were crucial in this process in that they provided the illusion that social bodies had been erased in favor of the abstract political body of the citizen. In reality, it was the actual bodies of various others that had been displaced by being banished from the City and confined to the recesses of the private sphere—­ or worse: categorized as objects to be studied, traded, exported, exploited, treated, policed, colonized, destroyed. We also know, however, that the repressed has an annoying tendency to return. In fact, it is thanks to the repeated expulsion of the social others that are made repeatedly to threaten the boundaries of the system that said system perpetuates its existence. This is where the life and death of the system meet: what the system must imperatively do, in order to exist, triggers the possibility of its undoing, and it is by toying with the idea of its own end that the system survives. Nowhere is the simultaneous making and unraveling of a system’s claim to universality more evident than in its compulsive need to expose its own limits and in the suicidal/murderous thrill it experiences in contemplating its own demise.“Islamists must be eradicated before they destroy Western civilization.” “If we let Muslim girls wear headscarves in public schools, the Republic will be annihilated.” “Should homosexuality become the norm, humanity would perish altogether.” These are but a few of the patent, and eventually self-­denying, absurdities that reason is capable of producing. Systems, it seems, get a kick out of flirting with the idea of self-­destruction. If this all gives the impression that “the system” is endowed with some sort of agency or volition, that’s because it is. Or rather, the invention of a universal, autonomous subject allows agency and volition to be located in and relayed by the individual, giving the latter the illusion that such powers are his own. (I write“his” because the so-­ called universal subject is always a 198 Taste male position.) The individual, in other words, is a ventriloquist’s dummy with a mind, a thinking mouthpiece of the system from which it stems and whose interests it had better serve if it is to survive. Whatever qualities the individual subject is endowed with were always present within the system from which it is an outcome. In Judith Butler’s words: “Where there is an ‘I’ who utters or speaks and thereby produces an effect in discourse, there is first a discourse which precedes and enables that ‘I’ and forms in language the constraining trajectory of its will. Thus there is no ‘I’ that stands behind discourse and executes its volition or will through discourse.” To put it differently, if an effect possesses certain qualities, it follows logically that these qualities were already present, if only as potentialities perhaps, in the cause from which the effect originates. Or: if, following Nietzsche, Derrida, and others, we understand that what makes a cause a cause is always retrospective in that it stems from the awareness of an effect as effect, then it is always already from the point of view and thanks to the characteristics of the effect (here the individual subject) that the cause (here the system) emerges as such.To return to the idea that the system is endowed with volition , or intentionality as Foucault has shown in his work on the question of power, one could make the following claim: what the system wants, it lacks, and what it lacks, it’s had; therefore, what the system wants is what it has rejected in order to will itself into being: its own end—­ that is, both its own limit and its own demise. If the universal citizen comes into existence thanks...

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