On Eating, the Animal that Therefore I Am

This chapter brings together Jacques Derrida’s philosophical reflections on the human-animal divide in “The Animal That Therefore I Am” with recent work in posthumanism and critical race theory to investigate tropes of eating in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Throughout Shakespeare’s play, “eating” is connected to figures of mourning, burial, racial otherness, the animal, and the earth as tomb. Although these figures generally work to divide human/animal and racial norm/other, “eating well,” as defined by Derrida and imagined by Shakespeare, also works to unsettle human definition. It does so not by circumventing the masticatory violence of eating but by tracing that violence back to figures of the earth, where bodies, species, and physical differences intersect.