The use of cannibalism in Lon Fuller‘s “The Case of the Speluncean Explorers“–which I assigned as a reading this semester to kick off my philosophy of law class’ take on the nature of law and legal interpretation–is, of course, a deliberate choice to render the circumstances of that fictional case especially dramatic, to place the actions of those who killed and ate the unfortunate Whetstone beyond the pale. The presence of cannibalism makes plausible the claim by Justice Foster that the explorers, by their actions, had passed into ‘a state of nature’- presumably a zone where human moral and legal evaluation and regulation breaks down. Cannibalism is used too, in tales of post-apocalyptic horror, to indicate that the terminal stage of a breakdown in humanity and the social order has been reached. (Think of the aptly named ‘Terminus‘ in The Walking Dead; of the ‘meat locker‘ in The Road.) Cannibalism is where the road to perdition takes you; it is taboo.
In unpacking the meanings of ‘taboo’ in Totem and Taboo Freud marked out one cluster associated with ‘taboo’ as ‘uncanny, dangerous, forbidden, and unclean.’ He found ‘the real sources of taboo’ in places of the mind ‘where the most primitive and the most enduring human impulses have their origin, namely, the fear of the effect of demonic powers….concealed in the tabooed object.’ (These later become ‘autonomous’ and become ‘the compulsion of custom and tradition and finally the law.’)
In the case of cannibalism, the fear of the demonic powers is especially strong: the guilty cannibal perceives himself as consuming not mere flesh but a person. The presence of the person imbues the flesh that is eaten. Moreover, the flesh eaten by the cannibal is too familiar. There is no distance from it, the kind that makes the killing and eating of other animals possible. The visage reminds us of ours; we all too easily imagine ourselves as the animal killed for the feast; we can conjure up its visions of pain and suffering; we can place ourselves in its stead with little difficulty. The spirits that animated the body of the cannibal’s meal are not strangers to us then; we live with them every day. The ‘dangerous power which is transmitted by contact with the object so charged’ that Freud spoke of is, in the case of a human eaten by another human, just the life-force or the living spirit which is supposed to live on in non-material form in ghosts. As Freud noted, ‘any one who has violated such a prohibition assumes the nature of the forbidden object as if he had absorbed the whole dangerous charge.’ To eat another human being is to make yourself into a living ghost; to risk contamination by an invading spirit by placing it within us. A cannibal eating another human is not just eating flesh but turning itself into a ghost. Perhaps this is why the cannibal seems inexplicable; we cannot imagine inviting demonic possession in the way he does.
Samir Chopra 