COOKING UP INTESTINAL ECONOMIES AND THE AESTHETICS OF SPECULAR ORALITY.

This article makes a psychoanalytical contribution to a cultural studies understanding of the logics of commodity consumption. This paper entertains a metaphor of critical practice that is more vital and perhaps less liable to lose discriminatory powers in rhetorical delirium, a model of reading that can appreciate both the sadistic and analytical as well as the absorptive and reparative aspects of textual encounters. Cooking is a transformational process which governs particular types of cultural logics, the separation of food from not food, feasts from ordinary meals, the metamorphosis of the raw into the cooked. Psychoanalytic readings of cultural artifacts need not repeat those textual moves characteristic of 1980s' feminist psychoanalysis.