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  • Theorizing Hunger
  • Zahi Zalloua (bio)

After reading Derrida, and not Derrida alone, I feel a certain hunger for blood; for, that is, writing about literature that talks of human lives and choices as if they matter to us at all.

—Martha Nussbaum (1990, 171)

The epigraph to this introduction comes from Martha Nussbaum’s well-known Love’s Knowledge, a work that straddles the border between literature and philosophy, appealing to multiple readers, who nonetheless converge in their Neo-Aristotelian commitment to literature as moral philosophy. Nussbaum’s “hunger for blood” signals a dissatisfaction with a peculiar type of interpretive style, the all-too-playful kind that operates at the surface level, fascinated by the text’s words or “signifiers” and failing, as it were, to attend to the rich lives of people. Her “hunger for blood” reflects her enduring desire for aesthetico-ethical nourishment—a desire or hunger1 that is ironically amplified by her reading of Derrida and other theorists (Derridan deconstruction often functions as a synecdoche for Theory). After reading theory, Nussbaum compulsively hungers for more.

Pace Derrida, Nussbaum foregrounds empathic imaginings in her approach to literature, calling for the cultivation of a deeper connection between readers and characters. Take for example her brief discussion of Euripides’ The Trojan Women, where Hecuba, the queen of the devastated Trojans, makes a desperate plea to Zeus: “Son of Kronus, Council-President [prytanis] of Troy, father who gave us birth, do you see these undeserved sufferings that your Trojan people bear?” The Chorus laments this abandonment: “He sees, and yet the great city is no city. It has perished, and Troy exists no longer.” Nussbaum praises Euripides for his ability to create “moral unease” in his Greek audience, “reminding Athenians of the full and equal humanity of people who live in distant places, their fully human capacity for suffering” (2003, 11). Readers of Nussbaum reading The Trojan Women presumably will feel no hunger, having had their bodily desires and curiosity depleted through the exhaustive and exhausting workings of empathic imaginings. [End Page 7]

This volume interrogates Nussbaum’s impatience with theory’s ways of reading, and her own “hunger for blood,” a hunger that can putatively only be satisfied by a restoration of criticism, one that returns the critic’s attention to the real matter of criticism: the meaning of people’s (fictional) lives and its potential effects on actual readers. In support of that goal, Nussbaum lays out a clear pedagogical plan: “[Literary] stories cultivate our ability to see and care for particulars, not as representatives of a law, but as what they themselves are: to respond vigorously with senses and emotions before the new; to care deeply about chance happenings in the world, rather than fortify ourselves against them” (1990, 184; emphasis added). Here Nussbaum’s “hunger for blood” transmutes into a hunger for particulars, which then, in turn, takes the form of a hunger for otherness:

We always risk error in bringing a distant person close to us; we ignore differences of language and of cultural context, and the manifold ways in which these differences shape one’s inner world. But there are dangers in any act of imagining, and we should not let these particular dangers cause us to admit defeat prematurely, surrendering before an allegedly insuperable barrier of otherness.

(2003 26; emphasis added)

What is at stake here is not simply the feasibility of overcoming the other’s otherness, but also the desirability of transcending the other’s difference as an ethical goal. Let us take a closer look at Nussbaum’s passage. The passage opens up with a call for hesitation and recognition: the self is not the other and the other is not the self. Nussbaum warns about moral failure unless each reader both admits the limits of the self and recognizes the linguistic and cultural differences of the other. The first ethico-interpretive injunction is not to cannibalize the other: or, in its positive formulation, to respect the other’s recalcitrant difference. Yet the passage ends with another warning, a second injunction: do not be seduced by the otherness of the other; or, positively stated (the result of a double negation as...

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