Limeating Inc

1 Introduction: Delimiting the ‘limeat’

Competitive speed eating has been progressively catapulted to a mainstream ‘sport’ in contemporary food culture and recognized as an entertainment form (Goyan-Kittler et al. 2012) over the past twenty years. As a result, the International Federation of Competitive Eating (IFOCE) was established, which organizes, promotes, and publicizes speed-eating contests across the United States and overseas (Levine et al. 2007).

The key skills for finding one’s way to the pantheon of competitive speed eating constitute a function of speed, quantity, and efficiency. Speed concerns either the ability of the contestants to consume their edible targets (hamburgers, pizzas, kebabs, sausages, etc.) within a designated time frame (e.g. one monster burger and fries within 30 minutes) or their competence in surpassing their competitors’ consumed quantity within a designated time frame. Efficiency, with which I shall be largely concerned in this paper, concerns the selected mode of eating that allows for consuming the quantity of edible targets within a designated time frame.

Speed eating is neither a suitable occasion for taking one’s time to savor a dish, nor a pleasurable experience during which a palate ruminates at its own pace over uniquely interacting ingredients. Moreover, it is not characterized by the sort of elegance that would fit neatly in Elias’s (1982)History of Manners. Speed eating is a ferociously competitive sport, allegedly extremely unhealthy and potentially very dangerous.

Speed eating as a cultural practice is a reflection of a wider preoccupation with speed, as an integral aspect of the efficient operations of contemporary production systems, but also as an attestation of increasing time shortage (Hsu 2015). This is also evinced inter-textually in cultural artifacts such as films (e.g. Fast & Furious 1–8), computers (processing speed), and cultural practices (e.g. speed dating). “Speed as an increase in the pace of life has therefore most generally been represented, justified and experienced as a necessary aspect of the bending of nature (including human nature) to human design in the cause of progress” (Tomlinson 2007: 44). “Food serves as a lightning-rod for all sorts of anxieties and disquiet about the human condition in late modernity, about the speed of life (fast food/slow food), the dominance of science (‘Frankenfoods’), a loss of ‘authenticity’ and diminishing connection with nature” (Nutzenadel & Trentmann 2008: 2).

But speed eating is also a striking manifestation of constantly pushing the bar, i.e. pushing oneself to the limits as one’s innermost potentiality-for-Being (Heidegger 2001). In these terms, we are confronted with a cultural phenomenon that may be framed as ‘limeating’, that is eating to the limit or eating the limit, as a will-to-introjection and giving in to overabundant orality.^[1] This is far removed from pleasures of the mouth and from any practice that is driven by the pleasure principle. As will be shown, limeating is a most unpleasant experience, not at all desirable, yet absolutely ‘driven’. In this context, we are not confronted with the opening up of subalternative spaces for examining the role performed by food in the constitution of identities (Cherry et al. 2011), but with a consumptive ethos that is equivalent to the loss and dissolution of identity.

The ensuing culturological exploratory seeks to canvass the phenomenon of limeating by initially offering a sketchy profiling of our speed-eating hero – Furious Pete. Then, the analytic moves on to discuss the cultural significance of limeating alongside the dimensions of drive vs. desire, orality, post-colonialism, and cultural cannibalism. The discussion on limeating concludes by opening up its possibilities to a wholly new consumptive ethos against the background of a new hamburger standard that values the annihilation of the valorization of scarcity in favor of the overflowing unleashing of the drives onto edible targets.

2 Furious Pete: Just another YouTube next-door celebrity?

Furious Pete is a Canadian professional speed eater many times Guinness World Records Champion (including the fastest eating of 15 Ferrero Rochers and the most burgers in one minute) and gym instructor.^[2] An engineer by academic training, he has attained celebrity status of global proportions thanks to his eating feats, which he has been publicizing regularly on major social media platforms (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram). I have been following his uploaded videos on YouTube over the past five years, from his early college pranks to his latest world tour. In this paper, I focus narrowly on Pete’s speed-eating feats in the destination countries of his world tour that spans the extended period of 2010–2015 (see Table 1 for more details). These videos constitute the most successful series in Furious Pete’s roster, while this is the first time a professional speed eater has added a globally appealing lifestyle twist to the sport. Furthermore, the pursued argumentation is directly aligned with the very global ethos Pete has been trying to institute during his world tour, which I believe presents a uniquely cogent case for limeating, while adding up to the burgeoning literature on how ordinary people become celebrities through social media enabled self-branding tactics (cf. Smith 2014).

Furious Pete is certainly not an incognito athlete. He constantly seeks to augment his already sizeable followership by leveraging any possibility on offer by social media’s connectivity paradigm. The ease whereby cross-cultural connectivity may be attained in a social media dominated environment undoubtedly was a catalyst in Pete’s establishment of a global network of affiliates, which he leveraged successfully during his world tour.

Although specific narratological aspects of his life-story may be gleaned from the various videos in circulation on YouTube, it merits emphasizing that as a teenager Pete suffered from anorexia that nearly caused him his life. His lust for life and adamant workout brought him back to his feet, restored his confidence, and endowed him with a fairly well shaped body. As a consequence of that bleak phase in his life, Pete became committed to working out; he participated in and won numerous body-building contests and equipped himself with the requisite skill-set for performing later on as a professional work-out instructor. He is characterized by an adamant think-positive attitude that has been tested even under the most adverse circumstances in the unfortunate period during which he had to battle against testicular cancer.

Furious Pete’s cultural milieu may be perceived as oxymoronic at least in the following respects. It might be expected that the amount of calories and the kind of food he consumes during frequent competitive eating circumstances would most likely result in a typically obese and unhealthy body. Yet, and this is the first oxymoron, despite his excessive food consumptive ethos of Dionysian proportions, he manages to maintain a fit and well shaped body. It appears that the Dionysian and the Apollonian forces co-exist harmoniously in Pete’s milieu. And this is not a misguided conflation of pizza packs with pecks. Given his anorexic past it may be surmised that his compulsive repetition of limeating experiences affords to keep the potential intrusion of traumatic memories at bay. The second oxymoron in Pete’s habitus concerns the objectives behind his 2015 global food cultural expedition. Whereas undertaking a global cultural food crusade may come across under customary tourist circumstances as a noble endeavor of inter-cultural appreciation, in the context of speed-eating where differences are violently annihilated, locus, ethnic background, and gustative uniqueness hardly seem to constitute consumption drivers. The latter poses questions as to why apply speed eating to a gourmet dish in a region far from one’s habitual locale? This is the painstakingly puzzling and sizzling issue that I scrutinize in the following sections.

3 Limeating as discourse of hyper-endorsement

“Anthropologists have for a long time considered food to be a particularly powerful semiotic device for cultural groups and, because of its overriding necessity and pervasiveness in everyday life, a form of communication through which expressions of domination and resistance can be made (Appadurai 1981; Bourdieu 1984; Lupton 1996; Fox 2003)” (Cronin et al. 2014: 3).

Contrary to forming a discourse of resistance against a culture of consumption and the marketing of mass-produced meanings, what I call limeating constitutes a clear articulation as hyper-endorsement of a dominant consumption mode that is strongly entrenched in consumptive mores, such as fast food (burgers, pizzas, kebabs). In these terms, the dominant discourse’s components are not adopted/endorsed with a view to subverting the discourse, but in order to institute the discourse as limit instance of one’s possibility of becoming as consumptive potential. The discourse is magnified to its limit, thus affording to set an example by delimiting the proportions of a consumptive occasion, its components, the rate of consumption, in direct homology to what one may achieve individually by stretching one’s limits. Limeating legitimates achievement as over-stretching and self-overcoming, in the same fashion that Furious Pete constantly seeks to overcome previous achievements in setting a record.

4 Behold thy majesty, the cultural cannibal

As already hinted at in the Introduction, a key determinant of the practice of speed eating is efficiency and the adopted eating technique. Although speed eating in essence constitutes a highly technical undertaking, to the uninitiated it comes across as sheer cannibalism and plain pigging. Cannibalism has been shown repeatedly to be inextricably bound up with discourses of colonial oppression (cf. Parasecoli 2008), while piggishness in everyday life suggests that civilization has not been fully achieved (Ashley et al. 2004): “He is like an animal…well, I’ve never seen something like that before” (14). “The cannibal, long a figure associated with absolute alterity and used to enforce boundaries between a civilized ‘us’ and savage ‘them’, may in fact be more productively read as a symbol of the permeability, or instability, of such boundaries” (Parasecoli 2008: 2), whereby the anxieties of a dominant order are articulated and relieved.

Cannibalism, over and above its examination as raw event, has been identified as the very inaugurative act at the heart of the origin of culture. It has been theorized as the act that opens up an ambiguous liminal space wherein subjectivity may be situated, akin to Bhabha’s (1994) ‘third space’, as well as in its metaphorical capacity as a creative cultural trope for the event of appropriation of cultural forms (Islam 2011). “Anthropophagy marks moments of intercultural contact, where devouring the other at once acknowledges an appetitive desire for appropriation and an aggressive process of deconstruction” (Islam 2011: 163). This insatiable desire for incorporation of the Other has been shown repeatedly to lie at the very kernel of pop culture figures such as vampires, a desire that is portrayed as being irresistible by vampires’ victims who occasionally endorse erotically their cannibalization. This co-existence of the drives of Eros and Thanatos (Freud 1920; Baranger 1991) is most eminently reflected in Pete’s brand identity. “In fact, hunger and the desire for incorporation and appropriation, together with sexual drives, are arguably at the origin of consumption in all its expressions” (Parasecoli 2008: 15). “Getting laid” is an integral ethical imperative of the ubiquitous motto that seals each hyperconsumptive experience, thus spicing up the preceding destructive incorporation of food with a touch of eroticism.

Why is Pete perhaps the most emblematic free-floating signifier of a postcolonial libidinal economy in contemporary social media? Because he posits as omnipresent polar attractor of every behavioral comportment the two underlying limit premises of consumptive culture at their most raw: an insatiable and uncontrollable drive for introjection/devourement and incitement to giving in to unfettered libido. He is a limit case as he constantly levels off the culturally specific differences in tastes, flavors, modes of cooking/serving, i.e. rituals of food preparation and consumption that are defining of discrete cultural practices. This is exactly what cultural cannibalism amounts to, based on Kilgour’s (1990) approach, i.e. the post-colonial leveling of geocultural specificities in the name of the ethical maxims of speed and introjection, or, more aptly, of speedy introjection. It is a combination of the rules of thumb to “eat or be eaten” and “be quick or be dead”.

5 Setting the post-colonial hamburger standard

In this respect, cultural cannibalism may be smoothly accommodated under the theoretical rubric of post-colonial theory, in all its diversity and perspectival pluralism, as a process of discursive suppression and re-articulation (Aschcroft et al. 1995) whereby a cultural sign is ascribed meaning not necessarily identical to the one intended by its originators, but uniformly so across diverse geocultural territories. This is most strikingly manifested in Furious Pete’s rearticulation of the differential traits of culturally specific meals based on ingredients, preparation, and consumption rituals into a uniform mode of consumption according to the tenets of limeating – quantity and speed: “Furious Pete style, let’s eat this burger” (Aschcroft et al. 1995: 2). In other words, regardless of what is contained in each meal, how elaborate its mode of preparation, and how it is intended to be consumed according to the mores of a specific cultural tradition, it becomes ‘limeated’ once subsumed under Furious Pete’s eating mode.

Cannibalism, thus, from a post-colonial point of view, amounts to the suppression of culture-specific and irreducibly so differences and their assimilation to the machinery of the omnivorous Leviathan of the Same. The cannibal, in such a postcolonial conceptual frame, does not function as a signifier for a determinate concept, but as an antonomasia for the bar that separates and unites signifier and signified. Pushing the bar amounts to transposing qualitatively and quantitatively the distance between the signifier and the signified by engaging in a cannibalistic act whereby the different is transformed into a moment of the Same in the spectacular act of cannibalism. Subsequently, the practice of limeating accomplishes a social ontological mission by furnishing a ritual of assimilation. This form of assimilation, though, should not be confused with the anxiety ridden assimilation that occurs while traveling abroad, for example, as an attempt at sustaining a sense of ‘home’ in the context of potentially alienating culinary encounters (cf. Bardhi et al. 2010). In order to fully appreciate the crucial difference between these two forms of assimilation, it is prudent to draw a sharp distinction between primary and secondary assimilation. Homebound associations in the context of culinary encounters with culturally different tastes constitute a secondary assimilation form that reduces the alien to the proprius in terms of determinate representations (e.g. direct comparisons in terms of taste, color, texture, etc.). Primary assimilation, and its attendant limeating ritual, concerns the expropriatingly and indiscriminately cannibalistic act of introjection, regardless of whether the introjected object is located in one’s ‘home’ or in an ‘other’ culture.

Additionally, a distinction must be drawn as to who is operating behind this colonizing process, that is whether this mode may be attributed to a globalization scheme and perhaps to specific consortia or to Furious Pete himself. I would argue that in this context we are confronted with a new form of post-colonialism whereby the colonizer’s ethos does not necessarily stem from a ‘super-power’ or a determinate state and an identifiable form of state ideology, but rather from specific social actors who have managed to be catapulted to global shaping forces of ethotic patterns by virtue of the ease afforded by social media’s connectivity.

Although in one among the plethora of Furious Pete videos in circulation he appears to be keen on anchoring the speed pillar of his limeating practice on a localizable cultural trait in state terms (that is Canada, his state of origin), this is hardly backed up by any serious or ongoing effort at gaining legitimacy in the context of such an associative transfer. Besides, speed and the culture of speed can hardly be said to be ubiquitously applicable across all possible occasions and cultural practices, either in Canada, or more widely in the United States or in any other part of the world. Rather, we are faced with the new phenomenon whereby social media players who have managed to gain global exposure become legitimated in imposing post-colonially their ethotic pattern on embedded cultural practices, thus affording to resignify them in ‘their own image’. Yet, the image Furious Pete projects is not at all a random concatenation of axiological traits that he seeks to institute colonially through his invasive visits to culturally different territories and in interaction with culturally situated social actors. This is not a culturally antagonistic predicament as a quid pro quo language game, but the laying bare of a fundamental ontological condition of colonialism as such, i.e. the will-to-introjection of the infant’s omnivorous drive. Pete does not enter into an inter-cultural dialogue with culturally situated actors, but rather takes his audience on board of a speedy regression to the pre-symbolic oral phase, where the infant’s mouth is king and the ultimate colonizer behind any state apparatus.

His approach may be rehashed in terms of a re-imagining of the infamous Big Mac Index as hamburger eating standard, that is as repetitive cannibalistic acts that manifest “the ideological anxiety generated by the expansion of the domestic to the worldly economy” (Jooma 2001: 59). The aesthetic judgments that are conferred by Pete’s global audience in the face of his cannibalistic acts converge almost invariably on adjectives and expressions that befit spectacles of sublime proportions: “that’s amazing”, “I’ve never seen anything like that”, coupled with slack jaws and frozen gazes. They fail to understand the reason why Pete is engaging in such violent acts (akin to oral sadism, as conceptualized by Klein, see Henseler 1991) towards his food, although they appreciate the technological dimension of his transgressive custom.

The violent and raw modus operandi whereby Pete consumes his meals is undergirded by the sonic signature at the end of his clips that circulate in the major social media platforms: “you’re dead”, in a tone of voice that befits video gaming, thus also attesting to the hyperreal character of this form of nouveau cannibalism. The compulsive erotic drive that fuels his omnivorous appetite is coupled with a death drive that seeks not simply to appropriate and introject the ego’s external environment, but to annihilate it.

The post-colonial hamburger standard inaugurated by Pete consists in the speed and efficiency whereby his edible targets are consumed. The new hamburger standard is not accompanied by a consumptive ethos that is defined by the pleasure principle, but by the death drive, that lavaic overflow of the unconscious’ unbound energy that leaves churned debris and traces of edible pillage behind its sweeping onslaught.

6 For the annihilation of all values: Orality unbound

Examples of Pete’s ethotic pattern abound in his ever-augmenting limeating practices. Most eminently among the various attacks he launches against his edible targets stands the glamburger from Honky Tonk restaurant in London (containing Beluga caviar and lobster among others), and priced at 1237.5 GBP. It doesn’t matter where he is or how elaborately his dishes have been prepared, as long as they are consumed with the same ferocity and speed as any dish. What matters is the constant affirmation of the ethical maxims of limeating – speed and quantity.

Pete is like moving napalm. He does not deconstruct his edible targets by unweaving the tropical layers whereby they have become solidified into seemingly novel gourmet constellations by treating them as culturally artful Gordian knots. Rather, he annihilates them cruelly not as an act of disrespect of their ‘alterity’. On the contrary, Pete adapts smoothly to non-habitual mores by dressing in local apparel (6, 16), by learning Sumo wrestling (10), kung fu (3) and Taekwondo (13), salsa dancing (8), by hunting for his dinner with his hosts (14), by acculturating himself seamlessly through giving in to all sorts of tasting invitations (3).^[3] He does not refrain from expressly articulating distaste judgments, however always in cognizance of not fitting in his habitus, but rather as part of an objectifying and blatantly essentialist discourse that would do away, albeit in mauvaise fois, with the radical ambivalences that inhere in any sort of cultural appraisal.

Pete does not deconstruct his edible targets in order to open up a liminal space of subalternative, hyper-hybrid, yet repressed possibilities, but rather destroys his target as an attestation of the ravaging drive that has been buttressing consumptive desire all along. Each and every food tourism expedition, regardless of geographical territory, is presaged by the mission statement “I am hungry”; neither by a willingness to explore the subtle, uber-local gustative choices in the variable enclaves that ‘stand in the way’ of his world limeating tour, nor by an encyclopedically totalizing encroachment of eccentric cravings. Such customary consumptive drivers are not in the least appealing to the kind of drive Pete is after satisfying. In fact, Pete’s drive is alien to any kind of tourism-related drive. He may occasionally stick to rules of etiquette and confer appreciative aesthetic judgments, which are usually undercut by violent eruptions of his real drive of volcanic proportions. These are the moments when the real ‘drive’ that issues from the agency of the id and which has been lurking behind consumptive desire that issues from the agency of the ego all along, seethes into the motion picture. At the same time, these are the moments that urge his audience to gaze in awe at the violently sublime introjection of Pete’s edible targets. These are also the very moments famous chefs (e.g. in Rio de Janeiro, London, Seoul) with whom Pete is liaising throughout his journeys fail to grapple.

Obviously aligned with standard cultural expectancies whereby one would anticipate that Pete would indulge in his succulent servings slowly with a view to savoring the intricate interactions of the unique gustative combinatorics spawned by his chef-hosts’ culinary imaginary, the master-chefs who are exposed to the limeating spectacle are forced to ask Pete “why are you doing this?” or to resort to prosaic suggestions such as ”slow down”. Indeed, it is worth pondering why order a glamburger that costs 1237.5 GBP, only to consume it with the same ferocity as a simple 1-dollar burger. “There is only one way to eat it…I’m gonna eat it the way I know” utters Pete in front of a soon to be victimized fresh lobster in Cuba (8). The answer is that drives, prior to morphing into symbolically mediated desire mechanisms, do not distinguish among their objects.^[4] They simply seek to introject them. By analogy to the drive for introjection of objects of the external environment that is definitive of primary narcissism during the oral stage, in Freudian terms (cf. Freud 1914; Sandler et al. 1991), when the infant does not distinguish between a handful of soil and a 1000 dollar steak that may find their way equiprobably into its mouth, Pete forces all symbolically mediated differences to become consumed by a churningly absurd, dilapidating materialist monism. “What Freud calls primary narcissism is inconceivable without an object relation. The object relation concerned is undifferentiated” (Henseler 1991: 199).

The event of limeating, thus, constitutes an act not of re-evaluation of values (the liminal space), but of opening up of a limeatable imaginary space as annihilation of any possible criterion of valorization that lets shine forth the raw drive that has been conditioning silently modes of valorization all along. Pete invites his audience to a regressive trip to the pre-symbolic (and, hence, pre valorizing) stage of unadulterated orality, as a “longing for ingestion that seems to define us as infants and later on – in sublimated and controlled ways – as adults” (Parasecoli 2008: 39). This regressus that manifests itself in acts of indiscriminately violent introjection is far from being reducible to any known form of cannibalism and/or cultural cannibalism.

Whereas cannibalism as a human being’s devouring another constitutes a raw form of hegemonic imposition and cultural cannibalism a form of demarcating symbolically the acceptable (normative) limits of a cultural order by ‘incorporating’ the Other, limeating as cannibalistic act in the context of post-modern societies that actively leverage alterity in quest of ever ramifying forms of multi-culturalism (especially as regards food culture) constitutes a violent rupture of modes of valorization by appropriating in the same act the totality of combinatorial possibilities. Scrutinizing the implications of this rupture is even more pressing in the context of the nouvelle cuisine that favors autonomy, experimentation, bricolage, decor (Pina et al. 2008). The act of limeating unifies any imaginable combinatory of cultural singularities in the event of introjection. It is beyond cannibalism in any of its known, thus far, forms, as it does not seek to draw a boundary between the civilized and the savagely indigenous, or, in its more speculative manifestation, between any form of sameness and alterity. On the contrary, rather than seeking to draw boundaries or to proliferate them liminally as micro-colonizing of the Negative, limeating reinstates the impossible valorization of the ‘object’ of the drives by releasing it to the amorphous continuity of Being, and by affirming the annihilatingly erotic (Bataille 1986) act of pre-symbolic introjection of the valuable.

This modus might be rendered more concrete by imagining it as an act of releasing a rare species from captivity back to its natural habitat, with the sole difference that in this context we are concerned with a psychic habitat that may be assimilated with Freud’s conception of non-cathected, unbound libidinal flow. And this marks a critical difference between drive and desire. Whereas desire seeks an object to satisfy itself even temporarily, drive seeks merely an incessant outflow. Drives do not seek satisfaction, merely eruption.

Furious Pete’s rupture in the heart of differentially valorized gastronomic compositions and their reinstatement in the continuity of an amorphous materia prima constitutes precisely a striking manifestation of this rapturous bringing forth of the drives that colonize their objects annihilatingly, far removed from any sort of ideological regimentation. This is quite remarkably exemplified by Pete’s expressed concern – while exiting London’s Honky Tonk restaurant after having consumed a 1237.5 GBP glamburger – as to whether he would have enough money for the rest of his trip after this expense. His response did not contain even the slightest glimpse of trading off the derived pleasure from consuming the burger against a similar pleasure that would be derived had he consumed a 1-dollar burger, the reason being that the pleasure principle was not at all at stake. On the contrary, most binge/speed eating experiences are quite painful and stressful, impelled by the death drive, rather than motivated by the avoidance of unbearable excitations that is definitive of the maintenance of the pleasure principle. And the death drive as repetition of unpleasurable events or re-enactment of unpleasurable memories is considerably closer to the limeating phenomenon.

Pete’s limeating experiences endorse the death drive as his consumptive ethos is uniquely attached to unpleasant experiences. Most remarkably, his attachment to ice cream is almost everywhere correlated with two facets: supersize and obtaining a brain freeze. The apex of pleasure is identified with the maximum brain freeze (Table 1, no. 10), at the moment when the death drive becomes indistinguishable from the erotic and the sadist devourement of food trades places with the masochist redirection of the ice-cream’s introjection back to the ego: “Sadism is to be conceived as a turning outward of a more primitive masochistic tendency” (Boothby 1991: 5). Exactly the same indistinguishable, mixed feeling that accompanies the finishing line in an act of binge/speed eating, at the moment where the limit as horizon of possibilities has been annihilated, albeit deprived of any teleological mandate or as excess for excess’s sake. In this instance we are not even confronted with a state of excess as being in excess presupposes the incidence of the possessive ‘of’ that limits the process of self-overcoming, of exceeding oneself as event of appropriating one’s innermost Being (an event that is equivalent to physical death). In this context, there is no proprius of excess, as excess’s master that owns its raison d’etre as possessive ‘of’. Limeating is not in excess of, but in-excess simpliciter as rapturous eruption. And this rapturous eruption as psychic correlate of the act, event and, ultimately, cultural practice of what I have tagged as ‘limeating’ is not reducible to a set of speculative remarks on a specific form of economic organization (e.g. capitalism, as argued by Bartolovich [1998]), but a fissure in the cultural web as memoir of the conditioning role performed by the drives vis-à-vis desire.

7 Conclusion: Limeating as a new consumptive ethos

“Food influences our lives as a relevant marker of power, cultural capital, class, gender, ethnic, and religious identities” (Parasecoli 2008: 2). The relative novelty of limeating as cultural practice and consumptive ethos rests with being motivated by the drives, rather than desire.

What appears prima facie as unappreciative binge eating in fact lets shine forth the frailty of the axiomatic value of scarcity as determinant of valorization based on demand/supply dynamics. The objective is not to possess a much sought after unique item and exchange such a valuable possession (even in the context of fleeting tourist experiences) for status, thus affirming the symbolic dimension of the valued desired object, but rather to affirm the radical dispossession of selfhood in the face of the drives by annihilating a rare and sought after object. Thus, the pre-symbolic value of introjection as regressive giving in to unmediated orality is affirmed. Does this consumptive ethos underlie a critical outlook toward late capitalism? Not at all. On the contrary, it opens up a new avenue of valorization, from possession to situational dispossession (without by any means equating dispossession with poverty); from valorizing differentially scarcely available cultural artifacts to scarcely available cultural artifacts’ mode of consumption, that is from owning to annihilating them. And, ultimately, as a valorization of the respective psychic correlates of these consumptive acts, from desire to drive.

In the event that Furiously (P)eating becomes fashionable we may only envisage luxury restaurants where top chefs’ artistic creations will be consumed to death in acts of playful introjection, such as mashing artfully created and presented dishes, in exactly the same fashion that her majesty the infant (Freud 1914) gives in pre-symbolically to all sorts of fun-tastic games with her surroundings. These acts would not be intended as a defilement of the system of signs (Barthes 1961[2013]) wherein such cultural artifacts are differentially valorized (which simply would affirm their symbolic value on the inverse), but as a liberating consumptive occasion in the face of omnivorous drives.