Since, then, bodies are thus consumed, and the members and parts composing them are broken up and distributed among a great multitude of animals, and by means of nutrition become incorporated with the bodies of those that are nourished by them, in the first place, they say, their separation from these is impossible; and besides this, in the second place, they adduce another circumstance more difficult still. When animals of the kind suitable for human food, which have fed on the bodies of men, pass through their stomach, and become incorporated with the bodies of those who have partaken of them, it is an absolute necessity, they say, that the parts of the bodies of men which have served as nourishment to the animals which have partaken of them should pass into other bodies of men, since the animals which meanwhile have been nourished by them convey the nutriment derived from those by whom they were nourished into those men of whom they become the nutriment.
This extended quotation is from first-century Greek philosopher and Christian convert Athenagoras in his discussion of resurrection. Here, he acknowledges the concerns of his detractors. Apparently a relatively minor concern to him, he engages with the question of how a whole body can be resurrected when its materiality has already begun to flow into other forms of materiality. As Eugene Thacker states: "Athenagoras' problems remain more interesting than his solutions."
Thacker suggests that as well as articulating an 'upward' movement (the process through which the dead are reanimated and reassembled in a superlative, almost speculative afterlife) and 'downward' movement (the process through which the matter of the corpse is broken down, transformed, and incorporated within nonliving matter), Athenagoras stumbles upon a third, 'lateral' movement.
this vertical, double articulation - the body rising up, the body sinking below - Athenagoras' treatise also traces a lateral articulation, one that describes the incessant and nonteleological transformation of matter, to the point where matter simply becomes identical with this incessant and nonteleological transformation. In short, Athenagoras' treatise happens upon a culinary transformation of matter that goes beyond the literal acts of eating, digestion, and metabolism, and tends to become a generalized principle of the world itself.
And Thacker uses this articulation to powerfully suggest that in decay, life is always in excess of itself. I am grappling with this construction slightly, but the implicit understanding holds. Life overspills into new life. This is a Bataillean excess.
Thacker goes on to talk about the life of the corpse. This is a progression towards immanence with soil, etc: "It would seem that the life of the corpse would decompose the corpse to such an extent that it could no longer exist, or that it would become identical with the earth". This reminds me of Negarestani's discussion of the Earth in Cyclonopedia as it approaches immanence with the sun. Is the Earth a corpse? Ultimately, for Thacker,
"at the extreme point of Athenagoras' problem is the life that is so perfect it is, in fact, death (the eternal life of resurrection), and the death that is so metamorphic that it is in excess of life, culminating in the pure excess of decomposition, fertilization, and regeneration." [...] These two forms of life come together in a concept of material transformation that is 'culinary': The decaying corpse and the reanimated soul are two aspects of a more generalized culinary process through which the very materiality of the world is continually 'cooked' (and eaten.)"
Thacker takes a moment to elaborate on the concept of the culinary.
"At one level there is the culinary considered as cooking, where cooking entails a whole set of activities that have anthropologically come to define the human" Here, cooking is considered as nourishment "at all levels, from the biological to the cultural". And is considered a tecnic specific to humans with all its trappings of taste, aesthetics, ritual, culture, and economies of food production. "A restricted form of the culinary"
Thus there must also be a generalised culinarism that removes anthropic restrictions, this captures a theory of "cooking as transformation". -- "Instead, we can ask: What would it mean to consider cooking as an anonymous process of the world as such? Cooking would have to be considered as nonteleological, benefitting neither biological health, nor cultural representation, nor economic imperative". This would require an overstepping of "metaphysical boundaries" such as "human/animal" or "natural/artificial". Thacker ruminates: "perhaps this generalized cooking would be a way of thinking the world as a continual morphology of matter and energy, but indifferently to the instrumental wants and desires of 'cooking' in the restricted sense."
However, Thacker suggests that this second, generalised culinarism, is still indebted to some kind of teleology, a "metaphysics of generosity, of a flux and flow of matter and energy, of a dynamic continuum of transformation." -- This is an issue because of the 'presentism of generosity'. I would suggest that it is this presentism which can lead us into the realms of anthropocentrism or subject//anthropomorphic analogy.
And so, we have a third variation: desolate culinarism. "A desolate cooking involves processes of evacuation, elimination, emptying. The aim is neither to reinstate nourishment and the human imperative to recuperate and recycle, nor to rush headlong into a naturalized glorification of the flux and flow of the phenomenal world." But rather, "cooking as desolation [is] understood as a movement towards the indistinction of everything that cooking-as-nourishment and even cooking-as-transformation would lay as the foundations philosophy's hermeneutic imperative." Desolate culinarism unifies the life of resurrection and the life of the corpse making them "mutually convertible into one another" - that is - with Bataille - "resurrection is also decomposition, the way in which the corpse is also this anonymous, unhuman cooking."
Thacker returns to Athenagoras' exploration of resurrection by explicating a problem that Athenagoras is regularly confronted with: "what is the life that is not negated in death?" For Thacker, to address this problem, we must overcome a tradition in Western thought to tie life to being.
Thacker deals heavily with Bataille's understanding of a life 'that is itself negation'. There is a lot of material here, but the basic point to take away is that for Bataille, "the negagtivity of life is [...] not the negation of life (as death or perishing), and neither is it the growth,or prodigality, or agglomeration of life (in cycles of growth, decay, and growth)." Apparently we must take a bit of a departure here into Bataille's philosophy of religion to properly understand what this life-as-negation looks like. Thacker explains to us that Bataille "seems to favour a dynamic excessive flux" as the general state of things - this is termed continuity (and, occasionally, immanence and intimacy) - "in continuity all distinctions are blurred, and individuation and differentiation give way before a vast, unhuman abyss Bataille calls 'immensity'". As humans though, we live in a world of 'discontinuity' which relies on individuation and differentiation. For Bataille however, ritual and religion can close this gap: "metaphysically speaking, it is in religion that the highest and the lowest orders come into intimate contact with each other. This contact Bataille often calls 'continuity'". However, this temporary foray into continuity, can only be that: temporary. We must always return to the discontinuous world. Religion, for Bataille, is the search for the absent continuity in the discontinuous world. Continuity can be accessed, but it is never intelligible to the human subject.
Rather though, when we look at Bataille's discussions of animals we can come a step closer to a life as negation. For Bataille, in the animal world there is no subject, object, or self and world; thus leaving them in a state of continuity; thus allowing him to say: 'the animal is in the world like water in water'. Thus for Bataille, when one animals eats another, it is an 'expression of continuous being'.
How exactly is the animal's continuity manifest? As Bataille notes, 'the immanence of the animal with respect to its milieuis given in a precise situation [...] the situation is given when one animal eats another.' Attempting to adopt anon-anthropomorphic position, Bataille notes that, while we as human beings may attribute qualitative differences to animals - from the scientific study of predator-prey relations to poetic evocations of the 'king of the beasts' - for animals themselves all differences are only quantitative. Animality is continuity because it is fundamentally the lateral distribution and redistribution of matter -- and eating is the primary testament to this animal materiality. 'What is given when one animal eats another is always the fellow creature of the one that eats. It is in this sense that I speak of immanence.'
However, humans are not animals. Human beings do eat, of course, but not in this sense. As Bataille notes, 'man does not eat anything before he has made it into an object ... man is an animal that does not have a part in that which he eats.' Thacker notes how living things must become corpses for us to consume them - however - that they are never explicitly referred to as corpses. For Thacker, this is because "the corpse is not only a dead thing, but a qualified dead thing. It is a deadthing with a kind of shadowy excess hovering around it, seeping from its pores. The corpse is simply that which remains, the remainder that does not go away, that persists in its thick, weighty, thingness, but which is never reducible to that thingness".
Thacker uses this extract an abreviated typology from Bataille's work. He notes a dead life and an eaten life. The dead life is the twofold life of the corpse, at once the paradoxical afirmation of a life that no longer exists, and a continuation of the life of decay, decomposition, and disintegration. In its first aspect, the dead life affirms the basic split between the living and nonliving, the living body and the body reduced to a thing. But in its second aspect, the dead life frustrates this boundary, as the decomposition of the corpse into its elements cuts across the boundary of the living and nonliving. // The eaten life isalso twofold: the discontinuity of eating in humanity, and the continuity of eating in animality. In its first aspect, the eaten life is predicated on a basic distinction between human and animal, with the resultant hierarchies and taboos that allow from that distinction. In its second aspect, the eaten life does not acknowledge, or is indifferent to, the human-animal distinction, existing only as the material transformation of elementary particles, 'like water in water'.
For Bataille, both the animal and the corpse participate in divine immanence, which we as human beings cleave away into a naturalized transcendence, either through the conceptual dyad of human/animal and food, or through the affiliation of the corpse with the thing and the dyad of living-non-living. Bataille sees in these two enigmatic states a kind of negative immanence that he aligns with the experiencesof mysticism. Both the eaten and the dead, those things we name as things, are for Bataille simply names that really designate an unassignable, unhuman state - the state of absolute dissolution that is also continuity, and which, for Bataille, is simply another name for the divine.