Introduction

1) Why do orthodox Jews eat kosher, strict Hindus vegetarian, Muslims no pork, Christians no dog or cat and others almost everything?

2) Are there reasons for this that go beyond the status of a potential food as possible disease carrier, holy being and/or “comrade” in the various religious contexts?

3) Perhaps because certain animals (and plants) havea symbolic value within a moral order, and so the consumption of these organisms could imply a semantic change?

4) Is there a hegemonic link between the holding as taboo of certain food products and the suppression of non-ruling classes plus the subjugation of non-humans in the respective forms of society?

5) How is it that it says in the Old Testament that this God had respect unto Abel, a keeper of sheep, who brought him the first lings of his flock and the fat thereof, and not Cain, a tiller of the ground,who brought him ‘only’ an offering of the fruit of the ground?

6) Is there a causal relation between fratricide and the aggressiveness of the vegetarian, who does not give vent to his craving to kill on animals, and thus becomes a murderer?

7) You are what you eat?

8) What parts of the fare pass across into a growing or subsisting living being?

9) Is with feeding part of the identity of the food stuff also absorbed and does food thus act in forming identity?

10) Does alimentary identity forming occur only as a product of predominant ideologies, social connotations between eating and eater and individual reflection on what is eaten?

11) Is the ‘identity of what is eaten' absorbed? Why does abstinence, asceticism, lead to enlightenment?

Taking eating seriously, as a material act and a figure for thinking, would mean following Rodolphe Gasché's analysis of Ecce Homo where Gasché traces how Fredrick Nietzsche's body and his eating become a written body of thought. He begins by summarizing Nietzsche’s meditations on eating:

But in the enumeration of the elements which are part of the sum(ma) of the body, we must also gather in what seems initially to belong rather to the surroundings favorable for becoming oneself, that is to say, the choice of climate, diet, and recreation. Now, with regard to diet, for example, it soon becomes clear that it can be reckoned healthy when the food is easy to digest, when it is not foreign to me, when on that account, it can be classified as mine. One should note there that food which is mine can be digested quickly so that the body, the body of the self, proves, in Nietzsche, to be a metabolism which recycles itself at great speed. This body is not constituted by assimilating what is mine in order to store it up; but in such a way that, by the rapid rejection of what has been incorporated, it is no more than a movement of assimilation and expulsion. ("Ecce Homo or the Written Body")

Gasché traces how Nietzsche is attempting to construct a body, to hold it together amid the tentative conditions of its possibility. That is to say, a body, identity, and a corpus is inclined to slip away from Nietzsche, so that in order to make a name or names for himself, he must continue to buttress Nietzsche(s). In Ecce Homo Nietzsche concerns himself with regulating, indeed managing, 'signs of healthy instincts' and 'decadent instincts'. He struggles with a hierarchy and 'revaluation of all values' that would hold together the heterogeneous traits of his thought. So as to order his thoughts, he has to keep within himself 'An order of rank among these capacities; distances; the art of separating without setting against one another; to mix nothing, to "reconcile" nothing; a tremendous variety that is nevertheless the opposite of chaos' (Ecce Homo). Such regulation is not just external to the subject but within him, a problem of regulating 'purity' against 'bad blood'. The body seems to be constructed around 'the distance; the art of separating without setting against one another'. It is through incorporation and distribution of so many different traits that, as Gasché says, 'the type-body in fact transgresses the model of the individual hitherto prevailing'. Nietzsche is never finished managing either his body or his system of management. His 'art of separating without setting against' is never completed, and his categorizing (as a cutting and ordering of parts) never solidifies into a 'rational' order. Instead, as both Gasché and Derrida argue, Nietzsche is continually introducing masks for his art of separation.

12) Does the spiritual decay through gluttony? Or is it, quite trivially, a question, in the case of this relationship, of an extension of the observation that excessive eating makes onetired?

13) Of what value is it to know that Deleuze cared nothing for eating, while Schopenhauer and Leibnitz were passionate patrons of taverns, etc.? In the ideas of Hieronymus Bosch did hunger also play a part beyond the inducing of hallucinations?

14) What does “you are what you eat” mean and why has it become a household saying?

15) How can one kill an animal, which is of similar constitution to oneself, perhapsh as even been used as organ donor, and yet uphold the laws of the limit of permissibility or at all talk of an ‘objective’ limit (animal as object), which is to restrain people from killing each other? Is the distinction by means of differential physiognomy sufficient?

16) What does one do about stages of development distinguishable between man and animal that are still not clear from the morphological point of view? Ought Scottish sheep, to which human genes have been transferred, be killed?

17) Is there a limit to the mind or spirit? Is the power over life and death delegated to the epistemologically impartial ventriloquist (Donna Haraway)?

18) From where do animal owners derive their self-appointed right to put their sick friends to sleep in order “to spare their beloved one further suffering”?

19) Do human and animal vegetarians differ from carnivores regarding their peacefulness?

20) Do races living on a vegetarian diet behave differently than meat-eaters when it comes to territorial expansion?

21) Is there a link between Hitler’s vegetarian eating habits and what he did?

22) Why is it that world-wide many more men kill than women? How would it be if we ourselves had to kill the animals we eat and could no longer delegate the unpleasant side of it?

23) How would it be, as proposed by Porphyrius, to eat but only without killing and thus to live on fruit and withered cabbage leaves?

24) Are Jainists going too far by not allowing any light to burn at night because it could kill moths and beetles?

25) Do beetles at the side of the road hear the signals of the tiny bells worn by strict Buddhist monks on their shoes for their salvation?

26) Is ‘Deep Ecology’ a way of leading one’s life to be aspired to?

27) Are the forms of animal consciousness, which have been demonstrated in anthropods, grey parrots and dolphins and which appear similar to ours, really comparable to ours (and is the direct comparison anything more than another attempt to abase the animal, ‘only’ to the level of a child it is true, but no further because measured by our standards)?

28) Does not human consciousness originate primarily as a product of the sociological conditions of its coming into being?

29) Doesn’t animal consciousness have to be something quite different, something we cannot imagine? Or is there a basic measure of consciousness, which is part of man’s biological makeup and also occurs in animals?

30) Did Kaspar Hauser know who he was? Do we know?

31) What does an animal know? Is not consciousness inseparably linked with memory, because it can only be experienced as a self-reflexive process looking back in time, and is thus not every form of memory, including the animal form, already a form of being conscious, because it is retrospective and thus exercising a conscious look back without which any retrospection would be impossible?

32) Is not consciousness needed whenever a decision has to be made between two options at the same time appearing equally attractive and exercising an appeal of the same intensity in order not to become incapable of acting? Accordingly do not all acting organisms have to be granted a consciousness (probably in a form specific to them) which in the case of equal attractiveness of options selects one on the assumption that there are equally attractive options?

33) Why is Thomas Nagel’s question of how it is to be a bat basically unanswerable?Why am I in fact a stranger to myself, and yet closer than any other person?

34) Why can an animal not be killed so easily, if it has got to know us and we to know it or it has even lived together with us? Why can we, once we have got to know an animal and then no longer want to eat it, still eat another animal of the same species, which we had not got to know, although with heavy hearts as if we had never got to know such an animal?

35) Is the Cartesian and behaviouristic premise that animals are beings which have no feelings and only react by reflex, our only and highly dubious legitimation for killing them? Would it not be logical to grant animals human rights if we reject this premise?

36) Why can we not, if we eat anonymous specimens of an animal species with which we have become acquainted, eat humans not known to us? Why do so many humans starve rather than eat the flesh of human corpses? Why do we not eat humans?

37) Is cannibalism something men do which, as Günter Schulte writes, “is the acquisitionof female fertility not by begetting, but by killing and self-fertilisation with death as its return into life”? Death of the other as a means for one’s own living? Oral self-fertilisation?

38) Does the Hebrew pork taboo originally represent a ban on cannibalism concerning above all women, since pigs are considered as sacrificial substitutes for women? Where pigs are eaten, are they being eaten instead of women? And does the pork taboo represent a patriarchally directed abandonment of the mother cult?

39) To continue, should human society abandon cannibalism and auto aggression by projecting this force onto animals? Is ritual, alimentary or sexual exploitation of animals to be considered as a break with killing, mistreating and assaulting humans?

40) Why is sexual abuse of animals considered a peccadillo? Is this a gentleman who wants to protect women? Apart from true sodomy, better an animal than a woman? Does he have to sow his wild oats in the body of an animal?

41) Domesticated animals are generally considered as organisms representing a product of man’s selective breeding, but are they not (have they not been) also essentially active, and is domestication therefore not a process based on reciprocity, even if unilaterally dominated (Barbara Noske)? Does not this mutual attachment also manifest itself in the respective dependence on the other: domesticated animals can no longer live without man, it would not be possible for man to be from one day to another without his ‘working animals’? Is the working animal therefore not like an extension of the human body, its extended phenotype, as man is an extension of the working animal?

42) Can domesticated animals protest against us in no other way than by diseases (swine-fever, mad cow disease, cardiac infarct)? Are animal diseases passive (germ attacks host) or active (host offers itself to germ)?

43) Is the walk to the slaughterhouse suicide?

44) What does the etymology of the Greek word for pig (hys) teach us, which gives birth to succulae, little pigs, a term which is also used for the stars known as the Hyadeswhich are looked upon as a symbol for children (Jutta Voss)? Hystera is the Greek word for uterus, from which hysteria is derived, the ‘neurosis arising in the uterus’, essence of the morbidly female? Is hysteria the protest of women analogous to the diseases of domestic animals?

45) Does meat taste good or do we believe it must taste good, or are we in some way addicted to it and enjoy eating it because it satisfies the addiction, as do other drugs?

46) Are the cruel conditions in animal production and their toleration or support by purchase of the products in question not causally linked with social conditions at the time, namely in the following sense? By consuming the flesh of obviously tormented animals is not something of this torment also conveyed, and is it the knowledge of this and the resulting disrespect of the animal or one’s fellow being, which enables such consumption?

47) Is taking sides with the animals merely playing with words, well intentioned it is true, but a discourse supporting the object status of animals, and is it not rather, as Donna Haraway writes, not about new representations, but about new practices, other ways of life in which human and non-human life-forms come together? About the end of wardship?

The brutality of a society, whose dominant trait can be clearly described as maximisation of economic profit, is reflected in the fate of those without rights and of animals. If we comprehend maximisation of profit as a self-engendering and runaway process, then we can see in it a way of life that has become widespread and is spreading further. It brings with it, as we see, tremendous harm for almost all those involved and for those who are not involved, and has to be curtailed in its multidimensionality to make more room for other ways of life which are more salutary for us. We thank the authors of this book for their readiness to describe their view of things, and the persons and associations mentioned in the acknowledgements, with which we have built ‘A House for Pigs and Man’.