from “take and eat,” chapter 2

If Brillat-Savarin belongs to a tradition, it is not one that passes cleanly through the genealogies of philosophy proper. It is, rather, a minor and often overlooked lineage, a current that runs under the table—i.e., beneath the grand narratives of rationalist detachment and disembodied aesthetics. We cannot say that he directly influenced those who came after him, but they did write in parallel to his concerns. There are, as Wittgenstein might put it, family resemblances—a dispersed constellation of thinkers linked not by doctrine or descent, but by overlapping sensibilities. Like the figures in Frederick C. Beiser’s Diotima’s Children, who recovered a pre-Kantian rationalist aesthetics anchored in beauty, these thinkers represent a different inheritance—though with a crucial difference. Where Beiser’s “children” (Baumgarten, Mendelssohn, Lessing) privileged vision, form, and proportion, Brillat-Savarin’s secret lineage privileges taste. It is striking that Beiser’s reconstruction of modern aesthetics makes no mention of The Physiology of Taste—a work published just decades before the thinkers he surveys, and one that transforms taste from a metaphor into a method. That the most important woman ever to speak (or, at least, to be quoted) at a philosophical symposium, Diotima, should have her “children” rewritten without reference to the very act of dining should give us pause. What if the other children of Diotima were not the sons of beauty as form, but as flavor? What if there were another tradition—call it gustatory metaphysics or, as Brillat-Savarin himself puts it, transcendental gastronomy?

We have only just begun to trace this alternative genealogy—though “genealogy,” again, must be taken here in a very loose sense. I do not mean to suggest any direct influence of Brillat-Savarin on the figures that follow. What I am pointing to is not a line of descent, but rather a cluster of freely shared concerns and starting points: the mouth as site of thought, the primacy of appetite, the entanglement of pleasure and knowledge. Brillat-Savarin may have spoken first, but something of his orientation—his mode of inquiry—reappears in scattered and subterranean form throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Nietzsche was one of the earliest to echo it. In The Gay Science, the mouth is the site of affirmation and excess: it laughs and drinks prophecy (like Ezekiel and John, maybe); in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, it bites into knowledge “like a ripe fruit,” à la Eve. Then comes Ludwig Feuerbach, who collapses soul into substance with his radical anthropology: “Man is what he eats.” But, again, it is with Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) that the classic sensory hierarchy is most decisively unsettled. We have said this before, but it bears repeating. There, the mouth emerges as the first site of erotic investment—the oral stage of psychosexual development, where attachment, pleasure, and loss converge. With him, the mouth acquires depth, temporality, and memory—it becomes the main locus of psychogenesis. After Freud, taste can no longer be dismissed as merely sensuous or secondary. It becomes the prototype of relation.

The twentieth century follows in Freud’s wake, digesting and reworking the implications of this reversal. Gaston Bachelard dreams through taste in The Psychoanalysis of Fire, where “flavor is the imagination’s fire,” and the sensuous becomes a portal to reverie. François Dagognet, in The Philosophy of the Organism, turns to the viscera, proposing a thinking that does not abstract from the body but begins inside it. Roland Barthes codes the mouth culturally in Mythologies: wine in France is more of a national ideology than of a beverage. “Wine is a social mediator,” he writes, “almost a totem.” Merleau-Ponty follows, re-grounding experience in the body in Phenomenology of Perception, where the mouth is a field of intentionality. “My body,” he writes, “is the fabric into which all objects are woven,” and among its folds, the mouth is where speech, breath, and sensation converge. Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror opens the mouth to abjection: by suckling, vomiting, spitting, leaking, the subject dissolves. Georges Bataille, that heretic mystic, eroticizes the mouth as a site of ecstatic rupture, “a hole that shouts, bleeds, and swallows.” Luce Irigaray, in This Sex Which Is Not One, blurs the mouth that speaks and the one that kisses, writing that “lips [speak] together—without one governing the other.” Michel Serres gives us a synthesis: in The Five Senses and The Parasite, the mouth becomes a vortex of breath, voice, taste, noise, and sensual exchange. Jean-Luc Nancy, too, in Corpus, inscribes the mouth within a poetics of bodily excess—a writing of the body not as representation, but as presence: “The mouth speaks and drinks. It opens the body to the world.” Even Roger Scruton, with his wine-soaked Tory conservatism, affirms the dignity of the mouth in I Drink Therefore I Am, elevating it through tradition, civility, and oenological pleasure.