New Left Review 45, May-June 2007

JANE BENNETT

EDIBLE MATTER

Do the ways in which we conceive of politics sufficiently acknowledge the force of ‘things’? [1] Does our thinking about political agency—about what can make things happen in the public arena—take adequate account of material agency? The traditional approach is exemplified by Leon Kass, appointed by George W. Bush in 2001 to the President’s Council on Bioethics and its one-time chair. He argues in The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature that this everyday activity reveals humanity’s place at the top of the hierarchy of being and our rightful mastery over things. According to Kass, ‘in eating, we do not become the something that we eat; rather the edible gets assimilated to what we are . . . . the edible object is thoroughly transformed by and re-formed into the eater.’ [2]