Cannibalism of Objects

Definition

Dalí's name for the imperious desire to consume the object world — a hunger surrealism's objects were designed to provoke and that Dalí proposed, literally, to feed. In his 1932 essay Psychoatmospheric-Anamorphic Objects he posed it as a production problem: "It was a question of knowing how one could end up making, for example, a table edible, to satisfy at least partially the imperious desires of 'cannibalism of objects.'" The hunger is general — an "irrational hunger, which ultimately revealed itself as a desire to eat everything" (The Secret Life, 1942) — and the surrealist objects are its synecdoche: "the objects themselves are mere synecdoche for the grand desire to eat everything, and this desire must be resisted morally through a carefully positioned abstinence – an abstinence that is only feigned" (Weir). Its emblematic solutions: the table "half made of stone, half of poached egg," triumphant "cooling slowly in the late afternoon breeze while suspended between two poplar trees in the forest of Ermenonville"; the full manufacturing recipe of the edible Louis XIV table in egg white, injected yolk and pumice-polished egg shell (The Secret Life, 1942); the egg-built Venus de Milo whose shell one breaks with "a blue silver spoon." The objects are its synecdoche and its stand-ins: they "arouse hunger and affirm themselves as desirable objects, but they cannot satisfy the desires they provoke."

Key Thinkers

• Salvador Dalí (not yet paged — see log) — the named hunger ("cannibalism of objects," 1932) and the manufacturing recipes (The Secret Life, 1942, pp. 319–320); the period of experiments "governed by a growing irrational hunger, which ultimately revealed itself as a desire to eat everything."
• Simon Weir — the interpretation: the hunger as universal desire resisted through feigned abstinence; the objects as synecdoche for the desire to eat everything; the displacement of appetite onto concealing shells.

Related Concepts

• Surrealist Object — the object designed as desire's trigger, culminating in "a desire to be eaten."
• Concealment — the hunger's structure: the nutritive interior is always hidden, so "the shells are able to present themselves as desirable objects without the violent scrutiny of a terribly revealing consumption."
• Intrauterine Paradise — the hunger's architectural resolution: at Port Lligat "there is no unfulfilled hunger and no registration of a greater exterior totality that would generate a displaced synecdochic appetite."
• Consumerism — the secular frame the wiki gives organized desire-to-purchase; Dalí's cannibalism is its libidinal, pre-consumerist thought-experiment: desire as a system, not a need.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Salvador Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment (Weir 2018) — the edible table's recipe; the egg-built Venus; the Lobster Telephone; the displacement of desire from soft interior to concealing shell; the feigned abstinence that keeps the shells unbroken.

Open Questions

• "The surrealist act was the invention of the method to produce such objects, not the preparation and eating of the objects themselves" — is cannibalism of objects then a design method (recipes, molds, processes) rather than an object genre?
• The edible table was to be "a Louis XIV table" — an antique, an outmoded thing: does Dalí's cannibalism desire the historical object specifically (cf. Benjamin's outmoded, arcades) or is the Louis XIV reference incidental?
• Dalí's desire is displaced, not abolished — the objects "cannot satisfy the desires they provoke." Is this an early theory of consumerism's structural non-satisfaction (want kept alive by the object's concealment), and if so, what changes when the surrealist hunger becomes an economic engine?