Nourishment: A Philosophy of the Political Body

This book seeks to replace the philosophy of the subject, underlying contemporary contractualism, with another philosophy. The ethics of vulnerability, which emphasizes the category of passivity, is the first phase in this philosophy of corporality, further supplemented in Nourishment by a philosophy of “living from,” which takes the materiality of our existence seriously: hunger, oikos, space and time, place, and enjoyment.

Based on a radical phenomenology of sensations, this book takes inspiration from the French philosophers who were able to suggest an alternative to Heidegger's ontology of concern, such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Paul Ricœur. Going beyond the dualism between nature and culture, subject and object, Pelluchon aims to determine the existential structures that break with Heidegger's ontology of concern and the philosophies of freedom that serve as a foundation for liberal political theory.