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Veganism for the Eyes.5/12/2021 If veganism is about much more than eating, it is because so too is eating itself. Veganism is a necessary if imperfect response to the general aporia of eating, which, as Michael Marder put it, “is inherently unethical, a violent destruction of the immediate autonomy of the eaten incorporated into the eater” (Marder 2013). Eating, then, embodies profound questions about nourishment, communion, predation, and violence, questions that transcend the subject of food. In “Veganism for the Eyes,” I ask what happens when we swap mouths for eyes, the gastronomic for the ocular. Drawing on Simone Weil’s analogy between looking and eating, I begin to develop a vegan ontology of art, rethinking art’s relationship to its objects through the notions of renunciation and restraint, allowing the objects of art to be, without being devoured. An alternative relational model, veganism resists current theorizations of intimacy and entanglement between human and nonhuman animals. In place of the intimate assemblages touted by major strands of posthumanism and new materialism, a vegan relational ontology looks without devouring, resisting the seductions of contact via the gesture of attentive detachment. Anat Pick(Queen Mary University of London) Comments are closed.
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