Table Séance
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It is unquestionable that 2025 witnessed the most significant philosophical event of this new century. It took the form of the entrance of Rickels’s The Case of California into the public domain and the publication of Ronell’s America. The space opened by the two philosophemes — California on the west coast, and America all over — has also flagged and inscribed what — according to the two authors — has been long in the coming: the golden greatness of our all-too-human Trump episode. Needless to say, as inheritors of Derridean work, their own oeuvre has often been belittled on the armed philosophical front of analytical argumentations. How to take seriously Ronell’s interest in the “cathected national food fetish, the Hamburgers and Frankfurters, the uncontested hot dogs of any culinary race?” (America, 99) or Rickels’s claim that Hitler’s “refusal to eat meat — to identify with the father — leaves the corpse unmourned, unburied, and, hence, no longer killed but murdered”? (The Case of California, 285). Their puns and return to different shades of Derrida’s carno-phallogocentrism, to pick one spot of their enormous effort, might certainly sound distasteful to sober thinkers — if only the issue of taste were not indeed at stake, when Ronell reads Kant’s Critique of Judgment together with Arendt’s aesthetic judgment indicting the “ugly American.” Benjamin famously contrasted the aestheticizing of politics with the politicization of aesthetics, which also means that there are ethical aspects at stake with our tasting — and testing. Going a pas beyond the subject, Derrida, in conversation with Nancy — translated by Ronell — tells us that eating well implies the logic of sacrifice: who can be eaten and sacrificed? The question bypassed by Agamben’s homo sacer involves the animal. Who can be eaten without a cry or inscription? In that respect, Heidegger and Trump — high and low brow of our Kultur — could share a meal and a project. The latter has been reclaiming his German inheritance as loudly as the Trumpf he has always been — dumb without a b, dumm, as you say in German — but, as is too often the case nowadays, Kierkegaard’s clowns, telling us that the theater is burning, are never taken seriously. When Ronell opens her French translation, Amérique, calling the American a symptom, an appetizer, we can also taste the American, lain bare on a dish, the naked king spilling our own blood. The Lacanian symptax, more than a law or crypt formation, is a recipe, and takes the shape of a meal. In her most recent introduction, Ronell returns to our eating habits: “The way that America feeds itself should not be foreign to inquiry — on junk food, Germanic frankfurters and hamburgers, French fries superseded by ‘freedom fries,’ narcotics, medial plug-in machines, overdoses of hatred, and large portions of ‘tiny countries’” (The American as Symptom, 88, 89). We could add hormones to the diet, equally shared by cows, chickens, machomen, and the military on speed — whereas it seems that only trans people are to be pure and simple. As everything else shouted out on air force one or next to the turbines rumbling on the White House helipad and other oligarchic asocial platforms, Trump’s rambling is assigned either the mark of dementia or unbridled narcissism. It keeps coming as an extravagance, irrational and shocking, and, even consequentially powerful given the mouthing source, certainly not so in virtue of any decodable and predictable itinerary. Yet, both Rickels and Ronell have long been mapping the consumeristic diet of a country which had to shoot out on us — to keep the language clean — what eventually hit the fan. Anno domini 1989: Derrida, Rickels, and Ronell are sitting at the table discussing the eating habits of Americans. Rickels will bring Bambi to the table, Ronell her vegetarian abjects in good and evil (from Kafka to Hitler), while charlatan Derrida with his bizarre insights asks Nancy, a question for us: “I would ask you: in our countries, who would stand any chance of becoming a chef d’Etat (a head of State), and of thereby acceding ‘to the head,’ by publicly, and therefore exemplarily, declaring him- or herself to be a vegetarian? The chef must be an eater of flesh (with a view, moreover, to being ‘symbolically’ eaten himself)” (Eating Well, 114). The eccentricities of Trump, not to mention his best pal and our health minister Robert F. Kennedy Jr., eating McDonald’s on their fly expeditions, more than an aberration are the nihilistic disclosure of an indigestible inheritance, coming to spell symptomatically a warning long unheeded. Without embracing Marxist theories and not even their ghosts, Isabella Weber can nonetheless break down for the audience of DemocracyNow the cocktail of fascism on ICE with our current economic derangement. She also does not refer to the unavoidable collapse of a system of production based on outperforming and discarding its labor force, lest the latter become itself the object of technology — on the penal colony in whatever fabric at home or abroad, wearing arms or falling under them. Instead, responding to Amy Goodman, Weber addresses the most recent economic shocks on a very superficial yet exhaustive level: “All of this becomes this toxic cocktail of economic insecurity, where people have been told over decades that their worth is however they perform on the market, right? Now, with these structural shocks, they have no chance to perform well on the market, right? They go to work every day, they do their job, and yet their lives are becoming more precarious. And then, when the far right comes in, they basically, you know, appeal to this experience of depreciation by saying, ‘No, you are actually worth something because you’re white, you’re a man. You’re better than these other folks.’ So, they appeal to this natural hierarchy, and they suggest that, you know, you are not performing on the market because the hierarchy has been distorted by women not staying at home, by transgender kids being in your sports club, by disabled children being allowed to be in the classroom, and so on. And then, the promise goes: If we remove all these, you know, distortions, then the market will be pure again, and you will be able to perform and show how strong and capable you are.” She concludes: “Neoliberal policies are often key to the far right, because the promise goes that, you know, it’s about these impurities, and once they are removed, then the market can do its job, and you will be doing fine” (DemocracyNow, October 27, 2026). This simple reflection picks up the piece of the puzzle that takes away any innocence from the American dream of free competition, while revealing origins and endpoints. As Rickels would say — picking an origin that stands in the middle — America has been fed on the route of the Donner Party. On the trek, he points to Ronell, who inscribes the invention of condensed milk on the very same wavelength, that of The Telephone Book. James Talarico, the current candidate for United States Senator in Texas, has been targeted by President Trump several times as a freak. The evidence for this claim would be Talarico being vegan, and, additionally, someone who, like Nietzsche (according to Ronell), would rather puke than take in the phallogocentric meat he is fed. The fact that both allegations are false, like everything else Trump says, should take nothing away from the precision of his statements, which, once again, rather than oddities, are perfectly coherent with the diagnosis of a metaphysics coming back home — to roost. Ronell asks us to read the expression in Malcolm X and Hannah Arendt, turning back to 1975. While Ronell’s introduction concludes with Arendt — just before the final twist that sees Trump’s golden urethral-sadistic piss expressing envy and resentment all over the unbearably white house, for a sun-touched latrine of phallogocentric descent — it starts with Kafka’s Hunger Artist. We know the story of the human animal. “The putting to death of the animal, says this denegation, is not a murder. I would link this denegation to the violent institution of the ‘who’ as subject” (Eating Well, 115). The hunger artist exhibits the murderous and legit consumption of commonsense, voluntarily locked in a cage next to the zoo animals, tracing a difference hard to trace. The compromise with brutality eventually discards him, yet, he tells us, he had no other choice. “‘I always wanted you to admire my fasting,’ said the hunger artist. ‘But we do admire it,’ said the supervisor obligingly. ‘But you shouldn’t admire it,’ said the hunger artist. ‘Well then, we don’t admire it,’ said the supervisor, ‘but why shouldn’t we admire it?’ ‘Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,’ said the hunger artist. ‘Just look at you,’ said the supervisor, ‘why can’t you do anything else?’ ‘Because,’ said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, ‘because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else’” (Kafka, The Hunger Artist). While almost trapped, Kafka’s character finds an escape, or, more correctly, when trapped, and precisely because he is trapped, he finds an escape: the spectacle was merely a side-effect. As Benjamin noted reading the law (of mimesis): In Kafka, the trappings are only a light meant to blind you and bring you away from the region of resolution — may it be just a flight into mimicry, or a heap of straw. Mimicry might indeed be another pose of writing for Derrida’s culinary advice: “‘One must eat well’ does not mean above all taking in and grasping in itself, but learning and giving to eat, learning-to-give-the-other-to-eat” (ibid.). He concludes dictating hospitality — or mimicry: “It must be shared.”
